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Penny Arcade - Comic - Nine Tenths
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Nine Tenths
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Also you're actually freeing them once you pop out of them because they've been under control from those hats controlling them, you knock of their hats to control them with yours. The hats are body snatchers.
I’m the Goomba
With the appearance of water at it's feet and so soon after season 2, I'd say so.
Opened at work without my headphones plugged in. Everyone turned around to look at me. Oops.
Also, this is some pretty low hanging fruit as they would call it. I feel like everyone has made this joke or commented about it already.
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
I think it's a reference to a horror movie from this year that's kind of a spoiler!
Buuut it does look similar to Eleven's otherworld journey stuff too.
Wildcard third choice is Under The Skin.
On the subject of one's mind being taken over, leaving one's consciousness shackled in the backseat while someone else drives... I've been watching He-Man with my son and I'm struck by how much Cringer hates turning into "that horrid Battle Cat." Clearly Battle Cat is a separate personality from Cringer. Yet Cringer remembers the violence his body is forced to do while Battle Cat is in control. Long story short.. He-Man is kind of a jerk.
The first time you possess something you get a cut scene of Mario's physical body entering its consciousness. You even see fragments of its memories. So Mario is sucked inside and then pops out to collect Moons or to exit the body.
For the record control is indicated by the moustache, since in two-player Cappy can be removed from the possessed being and controlled separately.
You have to knock the hats off first. You can only possess beings that lack hats. As to where the hats you've knocked off heads go... well, they go to the same place the enemies do when you kill them, I assume.
I mean, at least in Castlevania the soul-candles give you hearts out of gratitude for sending them to their final rest. I can only assume that the coins, mega mushrooms, and 1ups you get from the blocks are the possessions/remains of the Toads inside. And they're not exactly giving them up willingly...
I was thinking that too,
Though I haven't seen Stranger Things, I think it's probably more likely a reference to that instead of Get Out.
Occasionally there are one or two actual multi-moon goals in each level where you actually have do something other than wander around and fall face-first into yet another moon. Though usually there it's just about finding another boss to have (usually not to difficult) combat with.
And those rabbits... goddamn those rabbits - errr, excuse me, BROODALS. I feel like their character design fits into the Mario universe about as well as the "real" humans in New (badonka)Donk City. I felt like the Mario+Rabbids game actually felt like it fit in the Mario universe better, and in that one Mario had GUNS.
I don't hate the game, certainly. It's a decent way to pass the time. But I'm not itching to play it with every spare moment I can eke out, like I was with Link to the Past. Which, oddly enough, was another sandbox game, but then the original Zelda was as much of a sandbox game as you could fit on a cart. I'm not even as eager to play it as I was Steamworld Dig 2.
And it's probably not helped by me playing with the Pro controller. I just can't get into the controller-ettes. Maybe because my hands are too large and those buttons are so damn small. I feel like I'm doing the old Wii Waggle a lot of the times. Time to shake the controller, for no other reason because the controller is shakeable.
Yeah, that's my grump. I'm glad other people are enjoying it but every time I read another rave review (like Jerry's newspost to go with this comic), I think "why do I not feel this way?"
About Odyssey:
I have a similar reaction as Dennis to Odyssey: About half the game is pretty damn great, but the other half... Not so much. I wrote a lot of words about this here (don't click unless you're a great fan of walls of text): https://skepticalclown.wordpress.com/2017/11/03/the-art-of-video-game-secrets-and-how-super-mario-odyssey-failed-this-art/
Although I only today realised why things were the way they were: Because of the Switch.
See, I normally play my Switch on my TV like Thor intended video games to be played. But today I brought it with me to my job because I knew we'd be slow every now and then. So I ended up playing the game for 5-20 minutes at a time.
And the thing about playing games in short bursts like that... Well, one generally wants to feel like one has accomplished something in that time. And sure, grabbing a couple of random moons gives you that feeling. You play a bit here and there, and at the end of the day, you've made progress.
However, if that is the future of Nintendo's own flagships*; that they now has to be designed around the 5-minute play bursts... Then frankly, I fear for their titles. Because while it did feel nice to accomplish something in a short amount of time, every time... The sense of actual achievement got lost. The sense of proper level design is lost. The sense of going through a proper challenge that does take some time (and hopefully a few attempts) is lost.
Also, fuck their stupid and uninspired jump rope minigame.
*Breath of the Wild eventually wore me down before I could finish it, and I see now that many of the things that got to me in that game is also because of how they were making bite-sized challenges for the player that gets interrupted a lot.
I have to be honest that the portability of the Switch isn't really a selling point for me and it sounds like the games are now being designed with that in mind. If I did buy a Switch, I would probably almost never play it anywhere except on my tv. I suppose if I'm going to visit my parents for holidays or something I'd bring it along for that....but I wouldn't be hauling it out at a restaurant, the bus stop, on break at work, etc etc.
I did finally play Zelda a bit on a display console at Best Buy. It didn't instantly make me want it, but I didn't have much time to do anything other than kill a couple random monsters and chop down some grass (classic Zelda). I did get a laugh doing the spinning slash and downing a decent sized tree....so there's that I guess.
I guess I don't know the point of this long post. I clearly have more pondering to do to decide if I've finally outgrown console gaming. lol
-Tycho Brahe
MarcinMN, Zelda is crazy good, don't count out console gaming until you put some time into it. I had trouble putting it down, where Mario made me walk away every 10 minutes or so after a point. I can definitely see the idea behind Hawk's reaction, but that's not how it felt at all for me, just my 2 cents.
It's just that in both cases, the best is now surrounded by a lot that is... not so much the best anymore.
And BotW did not frustrate me so easily as Mario did, I'll tell you that. The main problem for me was that in the end, it was just Too Damn Big. Now, I am of the opinion that a game should end while you still want more, or at least while you're still content.
I sunk more than a hundred hours into BotW (the fact that I played this game that much should indicate that despite its problems, it's still pretty good) and still didn't manage to complete more than about 75-80% of what it had to offer; and I didn't feel like it would offer me anything new or exciting after that, so I just... stopped playing one day.
An often overlooked staple of Zelda games is that it should have a bunch of interesting and quirky characters to talk to. Majora's Mask* in particular did this to a fantastic extent, to the point where it breathed life into shopkeepers and people running shooting galleries. And it's especially apparent inside Clock Town, where a lot of characters has not only personalities, but also their own story unfolding over the three days. Including people that you don't even do quests for.
BotW also has its share of these characters. And when you meet them, they truly are wonderful to talk to.
It's just that they get a bit lost, because there are also a ton of completely uninteresting characters with completely uninteresting quests for you to complete, put in there mainly because a world that huge needed something in it to not be entirely empty (it's still very empty, though). They are fillers. They are stuffing. They're not characters, they're just NPCs. And they (and other things) turned trying to complete a game into a grinding chore.**
So, you know, if you're not a completionist gamer like me, you'll probably like it more than I do, as you can just focus on the fun parts and then go to Ganon when you feel like it. Same goes for Odyssey.
*Majora's Mask will probably remain my favourite Zelda game until the day I die.
**Now, it's not that I'm against grinding. Heck, I recently replayed Kingdom Hearts 2, and I specifically made sure that in each and every world, I gathered enough of the collectable synthesis items to buy them in the shop. And I always maximise the Drives ASAP. It's just that Zelda games usually have kept their grinding elements to a minimum, up until this game; and I feel like it doesn't belong here.
the first scene where eleven uses the bath and spies on the russian.
Tycho isn't asking to have Mario's actions be considered good, he just wants a system to understand them. He just needs to be able to rate how evil they are, not justify them because they are righteous.
In other words, you "Hope I like text"? Indeed I do! That was a very thoughtful writeup. You hit the nail on the head with the "hard to find" vs "hard to get" classifications. Of course, I'd add an "easy to find and get" category for Odyssey, at the very least containing the ones you can buy at the shop for 100 coins.
And this definitely helped me understand Odyssey and I suppose why so many people have raved about it. Nintendo has finally figured out how to incorporate the mobile game feedback loop. I can also see how that dovetails into Zelda, though overall it provides a better experience because an open world better fits its history of design. But even there, the one ding I gave Zelda was never having a truly satisfying dungeon as every other Zelda game had. It was more Ubisoft collectible game + easier Myst than it was a Zelda game when it came to the actual things you did. They just did a much more fantastic job of packaging it all.
Edit: Now I'm pondering how I'll look back on Odyssey. There still tons of levels of M64 that I remember by heart. Likewise with SMB1-3/SMW. Sunshine was totally forgettable for me because I thought it was blah. But I find I'm also forgetting a lot of SMG1/2, even though I loved playing them. I skipped the one with the cats.
About the strip: I also love the name for this one. Clearly, Nine Tenths is a reference to the phrase: "possession" is nine-tenths of the law, but also ... Nine, Ten, "Eleven". I know that's a bit of a stretch, but it seems beyond coincidental given the 3rd panel and what we know about Jerry's proclivities.
-Tycho Brahe
Yeah, I played a bit of it on a store kiosk. Just didn't really grab me. Plus I loathe the WiiU controller. I might try it if they have it cheap on virtual console for the Switch and there's a dry spell.
My main "problem" is not a lack of good games, though. I generally have more games than I have time, what with being a 42 year old man with a wife, 2 young kids and a full time job.