So anyway, funny story, about a fortnight ago i announced i was going to be doing one comic a fortnight. And now its a fortnight later, and i’ve decided to announce i’m going to be doing one comic a WEEK. Once a week, on friday (or thursday, for the rest of the world), there will be a new confabulation, and it will be awesome. Yes, like a proper webcomic does. Hold up, does that make ME a proper webcomic? PFFFTThahaha no.

So, the story is I noticed a huge rise in my traffic for 7 days, starting shortly after the announcement, and then dropping off shortly thereafter. By “Huge” i mean “Many times”, and by “traffic” i mean “Still pretty much nobody if you compare it to any other website”. Regardless, this taught me two interesting things:

1. The human attention span for checking a comic for updates is about a week, then they forget.

2. I’m hopelessly addicted to my traffic stats.

The biggest deciding factor in this is that i’ve actually had a lot of ideas ever since the introduction of the pirate hat, and i feel like if i pushed myself a bit more I would be quite capable of maintaining this schedule indefinitely. The second biggest deciding factor is that I suffer from delusions of grandeur, and I think that if i manage to get a certain amount of unique hits per day, the universe will magically make me its king, and i’ll get interfame thrust upon me,  get free money, and have women throw themselves at me.

…I mean, throw themselves at me MORE. Naturally.

Oh yes, and lastly the third reason was because I’d conned matthew into doing a bunch of stuff for the site “When i start updating once a week”. So maybe now he’ll get off his ass and automate that new comic thing on the front page of the wiki.

Game 2: Psychonauts

Psychonauts is a game thats thoroughly at the top of my “Best games of all time” list, and I’ll tell you why. Its a game with a truly original and well-executed premise. Its a game where 80% of the play time is spent inside the minds of others. As you can imagine, there are wondrous worlds inside the mind, and the both the visual aesthetic and underlying concept of each world convey this perfectly, complete with every persons own streak of insanity. It uses a stylised and cartooney set of artwork, which suits the world the game is set in well.

The storyline is thought provoking, and yet got more than a few laughs out of a battle-hardened comedian like myself. The sheer variety and uniqueness of the different minds you enter means one can never get scenery fatigue, which is essential in an adventure game (oh, its an adventure game too, did I mention that?) where you may be spending a lot of time in each location for being stuck on a puzzle. The platforming feels natural, and is indeed more enjoyable than the combat. As it bloody better be, if you’re going to have as much of it as psychonauts does.

My main problem was that through playing the game I was too intent on ploughing through the main storyline to “cash in” all the upgrades of various kinds that i’d been collecting throughout my travels. I always expected I would do it later, but then all of a sudden the game ends. Oops. Perhaps this is my fault for being too single minded, but why exactly is it necessary to “cash them in”? Psychonauts is above gameplay lengthening strategies like this one, so maybe it simply didn’t occur to them that you could cut out the middle man and make an upgrade take effect immediately.

Regardless, Psychonauts is probably the best-executed, most original game I’ve played, barring possibly Portal.

Next time on bloggin’ about games is….Portal!

So, for my university subject called “Fundamentals of game design”, 15% of my mark is blogging about games. How do you fit into this, you may ask? You’re reading a blog, which happens to be mine. And as luck would have it, today is the day that I decided to get some work done.

Game 1:

X2: The threat

Admittedly I’m starting with all my best specimens of good and bad game design. X2 just so happens to be my best specimen of horrible game design. And I will tell you why.

X2 was developed by an independent studio, and as a hardcore gamer myself I will never value graphics over gameplay, so when I first started playing it I was able to overlook the fact that during the opening cinematic the player models had about as many polygons as limbs.

No, the greatest failing of X2 is the game design. There is an introduction and tutorial, yes, but the necessary keys for each command aren’t actually dictated to the player during them. Instead, each time they have to search through the vast amount of controls for the desired command. Then, after this impenetrable tutorial, they are met with their first mission. “Fly four systems away, and back, without engaging in anything interesting in between”. The fact that they had to include a time accelleration feature should’ve said something about how unstimulating their game was. Engaging the player in a menial task is hardly the way to interest them enough that they will play further.

Also, it may sound petty, but inventing your own time measurement system, each unit of which ends in “zura” (eg. tazura, kazura, mazura) is NOT immersion. It is not a way of texturing your universe, it is a way of confusing the player and making them constantly aware that they’re not in a familiar environment. Presumably each such unit was equivalent to seconds, minutes and hours, but after a short while of determinedly trying to make sense of this system, I was unable to due to a number of contradictions, and concluded that the script itself confused the system. As a result of this, every following cutscene was confusing. Not that I watched many more of them, however, because the game didn’t think it was necessary to autosave before my first combat encounter of the game. As such, when I perished in flames I would’ve had to have done a whole lot more flying through space with time accelleration on, reading a book, if i wanted to continue. I rage quit at the thought of this.

The most amazing thing about X2 is that they actually made a sequel, which means that the bribe they paid that reviewer must’ve really paid off.

Incidentally, anybody who knows the identity of that reviewer, or has information on his whereabouts, is encouraged to inform me so that I can beat the crap out of him and get my twenty bucks back. And four hours of my life.

I have just created a thing of beauty. This thing is, of all my creations, the one that made me laugh the hardest. However from matthew, it simply got a “LOL” instead of the “ROFLMAO” I would’ve responded with, if presented with such a masterpiece. Either way, I leave the judgement up to you. Read on, for my masterpiece, at…CONTEXT.

In other news, for those who missed the news post that came with the latest comic, I have committed to creating a single comic each fortnight, just over twice as often as before. This newest conviction comes with a slew of new ideas that have made me relatively confident i’ll be able to keep up such a pace. Perhaps one day I will do a comic a week, perhaps one day I will do two or three. However today is not that day, so be happy with your once-a-fortnight and stop bitching.

Also after you’ve read that page I posted above, please comment on the blog about it; I would like to know whether I’m a horrible human being for finding it so hilarious.