Two things:

1) I like the original one better. And partly that’s because of 2):

2) Mark is FAR more likely to have made this comment than Sam. At least as far as the original characters were concerned.

Powers &8^]

First, a quick note about the punchline: Obviously, I think both are funny, which is why I included the original in the news post.  I make no secret of the fact that I like to talk about the process behind creating the strip because I think that some readers might enjoy reading about the fairly organic, seat-of-the-pants way that Dave and I craft the strip.

Now, for the second point.  I’ve made no secret here that many of the characters in the strip were not created by me.  The Towne Pub comic is based on a long running story that a bunch of my friends and I wrote together online while students at RIT.  Here’s a quick list off the top of my head:

• Dave Grabert – Marc Trebarg
• Matt Dolins – Savage, Dude
• Matt “Powers” Wilson – Nate, Sam
• Sue Meredith – Cap’n Hooter
• Kim St. Jacques – Taruga

When I first started the strip I tried to make very clear that I would always attribute creation of these characters to their original authors, but I would make them my own within the universe of the strip.  I understand that sometimes the characters will do or say things that they would not have if written by the original authors.  I can’t help that.  For me, the main characters of this strip are Phinn, Trebarg, and Savage.  The duality of their natures (being heroic adventurers in alternate dimensions while being clownish buffoons within the Pub itself) is what interests me, and what I want to write about.  The rest of the characters in the Pub are supporting cast members meant to be homages, but never exact copies, of the original creations.

And this most recent strip is an extreme case: Sam exists solely as a foil off of which to bounce the punchline (it is, after all, a gag strip).  It can’t really be said that her line is out of character, because in the strip she really hasn’t been developed as a character.  I get that the original Sam was brash and crass.  She also wasn’t (as far as I recall) a dimension hopping, sword wielding, genetically engineered samurai warrior (and licensed Fidotron pilot).  What can I say?  Liberties were taken.

I do recognize that there is a dearth of female characters in Pub, though, and those that are there are meant to be strong women, but I don’t want them to be strong by acting like men; (e.g. brutish, arrogant, and rude).  Well, except maybe Taruga, who I expect would be lighting her farts right next to Trebarg.

Damn!  Missed opportunity!  I could have had Phinn mention “the light show!”

But I digress.   I think that there is more to being a strong female character than drinking, burping, and farting along with the guys.  The last thing in the world that I want to do is upset anyone by using their creations in a way that makes them unhappy, uncomfortable, or disappointed.  But, at the same time, I can’t promise to climb inside the minds of other people and write these characters as they would have.  It’s an impossible goal.  I also recognize that it can be upsetting to see your characters misused so if anyone feels that way, please talk to me about it and we can discuss how to handle it within the confines of the strip.

All that being said, I think this strip can be fixed!  Maybe?!  We’ll see…

Due to a combination of burned out power supplies, laziness, ennui, and general malaise, there will be no page 12 this week.

However!

There is a brand new Tweener!  And this one features the triumphant return of Sam to the pages of the Pub!

(and there was much rejoicing)

Dave and I had an absolute blast doing the anniversary comic.  These strips are very fun and satisfying to produce, and they look great.  We knew immediately that this is something that we wanted to do more often.  The original plan was to do them between major storylines (or chapters within a single storyline), but we felt that the pace at which the major Towne Pub arcs move would be too slow; it can take months (or years) to tell a complete story like Reboot to the Head, and we didn’t want to have to wait that long.

So, almost immediately, we came up with another idea: Tweeners are pretty easy to do; they take far less time than a page of the normal storyline.   So why not queue up a backlog of these strips and post them during the weeks that, for whatever reason, we don’t have a page in the main story arc finished?  Fantastic idea.

So, anxiety about switching my brain from long-term-slow-burn-epic-story-arc mode and into three-panel-gag-a-day mode quickly gave way as ideas began to pop into my head and I started to script them as quickly as I could.  We have ideas for several more of these, and I look forward to posting them to fill in the gaps (and break the tension) between parts of the larger story arc as we move forward.

Oh, one last thing.  The astute among you may have noticed that the name of this week’s strip is “quartet,” which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given the actual content of the strip.  The reason for the name is that, right up until the last minute, this strip had a different punchline.  Originally, panel three read like this:

Sam: You guys are disgusting.

Phinn: Are you sure?  Because we’re looking for a fourth to round out the quartet.

After scripting the original strip, the other punchline came to me and, never being one to pass up a good fart joke, I ran them both past Dave to see what he thought.   Unfortunately, Dave liked the original better, so I went with that one.  Then, late Thursday afternoon, as we were making the final adjustments to the strip, I asked him one more time.  This time he relented!

And so…you get a fart joke.  Enjoy!

There is good news, and there is bad news.  First, the good:

If you look at the date stamp at the bottom of that very first strip, you’ll notice that it says “March 31st, 2000.”  Back when I first launched the strip I had been planning on doing 3 strips a week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it just so happened that that first Friday fell on the 31st, but how could I resist posting the first strip a day early on my own birthday?

So, as a result, Towne Pub the comic, and yours truly, share the same birthday.  Today I turn 35, and Towne Pub turns 10.

Ten years!

To celebrate, Dave and I have produced a new strip: Happy 10th Anniversary, Towne Pub!

It’s been no secret that many of the Towne Pub readers, including Dave and me, would like to see a return to the classic Towne Pub 3-panel gag strips that we did before things started to get heavy with continuity.  At the same time, I really, really enjoy working on dense, involved story lines and full-page comics.  It’s no secret that individual stories done in this fashion take months, if not years, to complete.  And so, even if we pause for a while in between stories, the opportunity to do gag strips will be few and far between.

That is, unless we decide to hell with it and do them anyway.

So what you’re seeing here is the first in an irregular series of continuity-independent gag strips that Dave and I will be doing from time to time.  I cannot even begin to tell you how fun and satisfying it was to put this strip together.  It was quick, and it was easy, and it looks great.  Dave and I were almost embarrassed at how stupid easy it was because, really, we should have been doing these all along.

Which brings us to the bad news that I mentioned up top there.  Even though this strip was relatively quick and easy, it did take time.  Late last week Dave and I had to decide where to invest our time, and we chose to do it here.  We absolutely did not want the 10th Anniversary to pass by without something special, and so page 12 in the continuing Reboot to the Head series sat by the wayside.  Sadly, page 12 will not be ready by this Friday.  I am not going to dump a load of work on Dave at the last minute two weeks in a row, and so we’ll be delaying page 12 until next week.

So, even though these “Tweeners” are relatively fast and fun, we likely will not have the time to do one every week.  We’ll do them as often as we can, and whenever we have an idea that is just too good to pass up, but realistically we need to make concessions.  We hope you’ll enjoy whatever we post, regardless!

As always, feedback is welcomed!  Please let us know how you like this strip, and definitely if you’d like to see more like it in the future.

Page 11 in the Reboot to the Head saga is live!

This page fooled the hell out of me in a number of ways.

For one thing, I thought it was going to be ridiculously easy to do compared to the first two pages of this chapter.  We’d already set the mood, picked the layout of the bar’s interior, chose the colors and lighting.  Most of the major decisions about stuff were out of the way.  And I’d decided when I wrote the script that these 3 panels would use flat perspective, which is just insanely easier to draw when compared to the one, two, and three point perspective used in the previous 10 pages.  I’d done a quick pencil sketch of Trebarg sitting in profile at my desk at work (which was the basis for him in the first two panels here).  And by Sunday I’d drawn the most difficult piece of background work, the “St. Pauli Cat” poster that you can see hanging on the wall.

So imagine my surprise when 11:30 pm on Wednesday night rolled around and I still hadn’t finished drawing.  It felt like I wasn’t even close.  I had maybe 2 cats penciled in the first panel, and roughs for only one cat in the second.  I was in a dead panic, and falling asleep at my desk.  By 12:45 or so, I was saving and checking in the completed strip, and in another surprise, I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the way it had turned out.

But I was being totally unfair to Dave.  He told me what he wanted way back in the early Fall when we first decided we were going to get serious about relaunching the strip.  He told me he wanted a backlog of at least 8 strips.  We ended up going live with only 2 strips finished.  He told me that he wanted the finished inks to him by Monday so he’d have 3 full days to color.  I typically get them to him Tuesday or Wednesday.   I accept full responsibility for these things.  It is very difficult to motivate myself to dive into the strip without some pressure on me, and this week I clearly failed to plan and took it way too far.

And, as usual, Dave saved the strip.  As recently as early this evening he had declared that we would not be making the Friday deadline.  He had a ton of work left to do, and he wanted to spend at least part of his evening relaxing and playing mass Effect 2, which he’s only playing because I begged him to so I would have someone to talk to about it, though at this point I think he’s invested enough in the series to keep going on his own steam.  Of course I told him to relax, we’d post the strip late, it was my fault, it would be OK.  And I would be playing WoW for much of the night anyway.

So, of course, Dave spent all night coloring, and he finished, with an hour to spare.  I really cannot emphasize how much of what you see on the page is Dave’s work.  It’s ridiculous how much depth, character, and life he adds to these pages.  So, if you do post any comments to this week’s strip, please take the time to thank Dave for busting his hump in getting this page finished on time!

Much Longer Version: It will be difficult to discuss my thoughts of BioShock 2 without some spoilers.  It will be impossible to discuss it without spoiling the first BioShock game.  If you haven’t played the original yet, well, what are you waiting for?  It’s great, and you can get it for, like, 5 dollars.

Anyway, in the first game you played a plane crash victim that finds himself swimming in the middle of the ocean near a lighthouse on a small island.  Upon entering the lighthouse, you quickly discover an elevator that leads deep under the surface of the ocean to the underwater city of Rapture.  There you are guided through the city by the mysterious Atlas, who communicates with you via radio.  The opening sequence of the original BioShock is one of the most memorable of any game I’ve ever played.  In fact, after downloading the demo and playing through the first few minutes I immediately stopped playing, and pre-ordered the game, without even bothering to finish the demo.  It was that good.

This meant that BioShock 2 had some pretty big shoes to fill, right from the start.  It would be difficult, if not impossible, to top the first few minutes of the first BioShock and unsurprisingly, the game fails to do so.  In fact, there is a naked attempt to shock the player in the first few moments of the game that mostly fails.  People playing this game, for the most part, know what to expect.  They know what Rapture looks like.  They know what splicers are.  It’s going to be hard to whip up the same kind of excitement and fear.  So, what do you do?

Well, first, you pander.  You give the players everything they want, and more.  You throw the kitchen sink at them, starting with the ability to play one of the first game’s most difficult adversaries: The Big Daddy.

Some of the impact of this twist on the core game play is hurt by a few things.

First, those that finished the first BioShock will remember, the final act of the last game featured a lengthy sequence where the player disguised himself as a Big Daddy.  Given that fans of the series already spent some time stomping around in a Big Daddy suit, it’s hard to get excited about doing it again in the second game.

Second, the Big Daddy that you play in BioShock 2 (called “Delta” throughout most of the game) plays almost exactly like the main character from the first game.  You unleash plasmids from your left hand, and fire weapons with the right.  Sure, you get a nifty drill (which has limited utility), but most of the other weapons are standard FPS fare with a twist.  The spear gun, for example, plays just like a sniper rifle.  The rivet gun is like a powerful pistol.  Other weapons, like the grenade launcher, shotgun, and machine gun, all play like they do in every other FPS.  To make matters worse, the game eases you in through a series of tutorials that are shockingly similar to those in the first game.  These include using your lightning-bolt to flip switches and open doors, using telekinesis to fetch far away objects, and using fire to melt ice that is blocking your way.  I don’t mind reusing the powers from the first game, which makes sense, but presenting players with the same exact series of obstacles and puzzles early in the game feels tired and overdone (especially given that these mini-puzzles rarely show up later in the game).

Third, and worst, your Big Daddy is a wimp.  At the beginning of the game you have few weapons, only a little health, and a minuscule store of EVE (the resource needed to power your “plasmid” abilities).  In fact, other than the drill jutting out in the lower right corner of the screen, it doesn’t feel like you’re playing a Big Daddy at all.  In the early parts of the game small numbers of splicers present a real threat to your survival, forcing you to run, duck, and hide just like any other normal human.  Contrast this with the other Big Daddies from both games, which you often see fighting 5 or 6 splicers at a time without breaking a sweat.  Still even worse is that you are not a match in one-on-one combat with any of the other Big Daddies in the game; you will find that you need to plan your strategy, set traps, use cover, run away a lot, and pop health packs like candy in order to beat a Big Daddy, especially in the first third of the game when your health and EVE reserves are low.  From a game design perspective, I think that the Big Daddy mechanic in BioShock 2 comes off as a total gimmick; it’s not implemented very well at all.  The excitement that comes from the idea of playing a Big Daddy stems from the fact that they are so big and powerful in the first game.  Simply slapping a Big Daddy texture over the same kind of weak player really stings.

And the problems of BioShock 2 don’t end there.  The controls are great, except for the all-important research camera.  The camera, which you get fairly early in the game, is used to record your enemies while you fight them.  Record a specific enemy enough, and you will unlock research that benefits you in some way.  Examples include new gene tonics, plasmids, learning which weapons are most effective against that enemy, or simply increasing the damage that you do.  It’s a really neat mechanic, but it’s implemented poorly.  First, in order for you to start recording, you must switch to the camera like you would any other weapon.  On the 360 this involves holding the Right Button (RB) down, which pauses the game and brings up your weapon wheel.  Now you can use the analog stick to select the camera.  While the camera is out you can use plasmids, but you can’t fire weapons.  The good news is that, once you start recording, you will automatically switch to whatever weapon you were using before you equipped the camera.  The bad news is two-fold: 1.) if you have already completely researched an enemy, you can’t start recording, and therefore you can’t auto-switch weapons, and 2.) sometimes the weapon you had equipped before was lame and ineffective against the enemy you’re facing now (e.g. the “hack tool” used to hack into computers).  It would have been far better to assign the camera to its own button (like, say, a click of the right analog stick) to allow players to start recording without futzing with weapons.

I’ve said an awful lot about what makes BioShock 2 less than stellar, but I want to take a moment to say now that I really enjoyed the game.   The first act was essentially a carbon copy of the same segment from the first game, but the story really starts to pick up steam in the second and final acts.  Despite the rumors surrounding the pre-release of the game, you discover that you were not the first Big Daddy per se.  Instead, throughout the game you discover that you were the first Big Daddy to be successfully bound to a specific Little Sister; previous attempts had failed, resulting in insanity or death in the Big Daddies.   I don’t want to spoil anything for those who are planning on playing through the game, but I will say that the story builds up to an incredibly satisfying conclusion, with a lot of really “gee whiz, that’s neat!” moments in the final act.  Like the first game, the ending of the story depends heavily on how you treat many of the other characters in the game.  Unlike the first game, and this is one of the places where the sequel really improves, the outcome of your decisions is not mostly isolated to the final cut scene.  Throughout the game you will encounter several characters that you will be given an opportunity to kill.  They are all more-or-less at your mercy, and some deserve a nasty fate more than others.  How you treat them will greatly affect  how the story plays out, not only in cut scenes and dialog, but in other aspects as well, including in some cases the appearance of the levels.  It’s definitely worth considering how you want the game world and the characters that inhabit it to reflect your choices.

Another really great improvement over the first game is the way that you interact with “Little Sisters.”  As anyone that played the first game will remember, Little Sisters are brainwashed little girls that have been genetically modified to be able to sense corpses containing “Adam,” the material that makes granting powers and abilities with plasmids possible.  In order for a person to use a plasmid that grants the ability to shoot lightning from their fingers, for example, they must combine the plasmid with Adam, which helps to rewrite their genetic code.  Little Sisters are responsible for finding dead bodies that contain Adam, and for extracting the Adam from the bodies using giant, nasty looking syringes.  Of course the splicers and various degenerates in Rapture want to get their hands on as much Adam as possible, and so they hunt down Little Sisters.  This is why the Big Daddies are needed: to defend the Little Sisters from anyone that would do them harm.

In the first game your interaction with the Little Sisters was somewhat limited.   First you needed to kill the Big Daddy defending the Little Sister.  Then you would be given the choice to either save the Little Sister (let her go) for a small amount of Adam, or harvest the Little Sister for a little bit more Adam.  These choices are what determined whether or not your character was “good” or “evil” and affected how the game ended.  In the sequel, things play out very differently.  You start the same way: killing the Big Daddy defending a Little Sister.  Then you are given the choice to immediately harvest her, or to adopt her.  Should you choose to adopt the Little Sister, she will ride around on your shoulders as you make your way through the level.  This can be fun when she makes comments as you fight your way through waves of enemies, some of which can be darkly disturbing and funny (for example, after you set someone on fire, she’ll say “Ooooh!  Marshmallows!”).    While a Little Sister is on your shoulders you can ask her to lead you to a corpse containing Adam.  She doesn’t leave your shoulders, unfortunately, but you are provided with an ethereal white trail of mist that you can follow to the body.  Once there, the fun really starts.  You can tell the Little Sister to harvest the Adam from the corpse, but once you do splicers will begin attacking from every conceivable direction.  The game pulls no punches: it will throw the biggest, baddest splicers you have seen up to that point in the game, and they will keep coming.  The goal of the splicers is to kill you, and kidnap the Little Sister, but not necessarily in that order.  Your job is to keep the splicers away from her until she’s done.  You can choose to stand over her and just attack anything that comes at you, or you can use the various weapons, gadgets, and plasmids in the game to set traps  and only pick off the stragglers that get through your defenses.  My favorite tactic was to drop a few mini turrets, lay trap rivets in arcs around the Little Sister, place a few proximity mines and a Cyclone Trap or two, and then use the Hypnotize plasmid to charm the first splicer that shows up to fight on my side.

Once you have used a Little Sister to harvest Adam twice, you will be given the choice to let her go, or a second opportunity to harvest her.  Like the first game, choosing to harvest will grant you an immediate bonus of Adam.  But also like the first game, should you choose to let Little Sisters go, you will be rewarded later (with care packages left for you filled with Adam, plasmids, money, and other goodies).  In the end, I don’t know which path gives your more Adam, though I suspect that harvesting comes out ahead.  However, saving the Little Sisters grants plasmids and gene tonics you would not be able to get otherwise, not to mention a warm and fuzzy feeling from being a swell guy.

Beyond all that, the game plays in much the same way as the first BioShock.  You are being lead around by mysterious strangers who communicate to you in various ways including radio transmissions, televisions, telepathy, and PA systems.  Most of the back story is revealed through tape-recorders that you find scattered throughout Rapture.  While I love listening to these, I find this habit of the citizens of Rapture to be hilarious.  Each of these diary entries is left on a full-sized tape recorder.  Most are not more than 30-60 seconds.  The idea that everyone in Rapture is carrying around a few dozen tape recorders so that they can capture random thoughts before leaving them on the side of a random hallway is pretty funny.  All that being said, you get tons of background and history for Rapture, the major characters from both games (including those long dead), and even some references to the events of the first game.  This is also where you get most of the back story surrounding the Big Daddy program, and your involvement therein.  Unfortunately, because many of these are hidden and/or easy to miss, if you don’t find certain, important tape recorders, you will be missing big parts of the back story.  I didn’t even find 100 out of the 138 scattered throughout Rapture, so I’m fairly certain that I missed some pieces of the puzzle.  It’s unfortunate because, unlike the first game, you can’t really backtrack to previous levels, so if you miss something, you’ve missed it forever.

In the end, I thoroughly enjoyed BioShock 2, though it took me several hours of play before I really got hooked.  A lot of this had to do with the expectations set by the game and the pre-release buzz.  Much of what the game promised was implemented poorly (i.e. playing a wimpy Big Daddy), and there were a lot of misleading rumors and speculation about the story that didn’t play out (e.g. there is only one Big Sister, you are the first Big Daddy, etc.).  Once you slog through the opening act, though, you’ll start to remember what it is about the first BioShock that you loved so much.  The core gameplay is almost completely intact, and there are some really nice additions that make BioShock 2 its own game.  Is it as good as the first?  No.  But how could it be?  Discovery and surprise were much of what made the first game great, and it would be impossible for BioShock 2 to have the same impact.  But, what you do get is a fun, if familiar, game.  And that’s what really matters.

Not that I have any right to tell you how to do your comic… but I wonder if you could have excised the second panel and pushed the monologue into the other two. As you note, space is at a premium in comics, and so sometimes you have to show your action in as few panels as possible.

I have mentioned repeatedly that I struggle with “panel density” in these new strips, especially given the dearth of updates (one per week) which means that there is a long wait between comics.  This presents difficult problems for keeping readers engaged, and so I want to try to get more panels, more dialog, more action into the comics.  So here, Powers has definitely tapped into something with which I struggle often.  The biggest problem for me is that I do not like working small.  I dislike drawing small, and I don’t like putting small font into the comic.  It’s bizarre because, when I am reading comics, I don’t even notice when there are 8, 9, 10 panels on a page.  The art looks fine, and everything is clear and readable.  I don’t know why I have trouble with it myself.

I will say that I am writing the script as clearly defined pages, which is something I’ve never done before.  In the past I would write scripts panel-by-panel, and decide which panels (and how many) to include on a page when the time came to sit down and plot the page out.  Now, I try to capture a logical sequence of action to “fit’ a single page.  A great example, I think, is the “I have had enough of you” page, and the following “jetpack ignition” page as well.  I would not have wanted to break that action sequence across multiple pages, especially if that meant starting it half way through one page, and ending it half way through another.  I’m trying to make careful, thoughtful decisions about what is going on in a single page.

So, as I said, this page was supposed to be 6 panels originally and I struggled with that for a day or so when trying to do the rough layout.  I could NOT figure out how I was going to fit Trebarg, the cats, and the dialog into 6 panels.  Not without making some dramatic concessions.  So, the next logical question was, how do I break up the page to make the new, individual pages, still work as individual units?  As it happens, the logical point of separation was the half way mark; 3 panels on this page, and 3 on the next page.  I absolutely hate talking about upcoming strips in any detail before we actually post them, so I’ll refrain from getting too specific as to why I felt that way, but I hope you’ll trust me

That being said, Powers’ comment is absolutely valid: these three panels absolutely could have been condensed into two with some success.  The action between panels 2 and 3 (which basically shows several of the cats pulling out knives) is fairly subtle.  I would still have some misgivings about fitting the dialog into two panels, but I probably could have made it work.    The problem then would be what to fill the remaining space with.  I could pull a panel from the next page, but that would leave me with only 2 panels for page 11, unless I started sucking panels in from page 12.  This would begin to affect the flow of the script, and how I’ve decided to break up the action from page to page.  Would anyone even notice besides me?  Probably not.

Suffice it to say, these are things that we really do put a lot of thought into.  On some days it feels like we have no time, and that we are churning these pages out at a breakneck pace.  As readers I can understand why it would feel slow and tedious between pages, but for us we are literally working on these every day.  We make decisions by the seats of our pants and hope that you’ll just bear with us.  But, feedback is always good, and I want folks to know that we don’t make even simple decisions, like how many panels to include, lightly.  Knowing what readers would like to see definitely factors in, though, so in the future I’ll try to work a little more outside my comfort zone to pack more into each page!

Page 10 in the Reboot to the Head series is live!  Enjoy!

I’ve talked a lot…

…well…I just talk a lot.

But!  One thing I have talked a lot about recently is “panel density.”  That I’d like to fit more panels into each strip.  Given that there is a week between page updates, I want to give folks a little something to look at/read to tide them over until the next update.  Unfortunately, when writing the script for this chapter, I got a little carried away.  This page was supposed to be 6 panels.  What you see here was to be the first 3.  So I was supposed to squeeze Trebarg, 8 cats, two tables, and all that dialog into panels roughly half the size of what you see here.

Yeah, no.

So, instead, I decided to stretch this out into two pages, which would give me room to actually show what was going on in these panels.  As I reread the script I realized that I had committed the same crime on subsequent pages.  Too much action and dialog to actually squeeze into small panels on a single page.  So, instead of a 3 page chapter, this will be at least 4 or 5 pages.  I think it will work out a lot better in the end.

At any rate, I hope that you have enjoyed the last couple of pages.  As always, we look forward to your comments and e-mails.

When we were working on page 9 of the Reboot to the Head saga, we really wanted to make the background feel like a real bar.  That meant filling the walls with the kind of stuff you’d see in a bar.   The first thing that sprang to mind for me was the Captain Morgan Poster that we’ve all seen like a million times.  Of course on a planet of feline aliens, we can’t have a normal looking Captain Morgan.  And so, Captain Felix was born.  You can spot him on the right wall, in the back of page 9.

I knew I was going to be needing the poster in several panels over the next few pages, so I drew it in a separate file, at fairly high resolution and quality.  Then Dave colored it, and added the textured “old parchment” background and border.  Dave was then able to insert the poster into the background and adjust for the perspective.  We had always planned on posting the full sized poster image today to give people something amusing to look at, but then Dave went above and beyond and made some really spiffy wallpaper, which you can find on the Goodies page.

Sorry that this isn’t more substantial.  I’m a bit distracted at the moment.  Either way, please enjoy!

HEY! The strip IS live. Click that Latest Comic link in the menu bar!

Bob will be back to post something that he believes to be witty soon!

Enjoy

-trebarg

The new Reboot to the Head page was live as of 12 am last night, but for those of you (Hi, Powers!) that may have stopped by before about 10 o’clock this morning, you would have seen an empty news post to go along with it.  I apologize for that.  Last night I was suffering from a splitting headache that only got worse as the night went on.  I typed a 2 or 3 line news post and hit the “update” button in WordPress but, alas, it did not update for whatever reason.  I know that the loyal fan….er…fans of Towne Pub hang on my every word, so I want to express how deeply, deeply sorry I am for the oversight.

I would also like to say that I’m sorry that this page is late going up.  This chapter of Reboot to the Head sees the return of Marc Trebarg, which I am very excited about.  It also features the first in-strip appearance of the redesigned character: now with 100% more necky goodness.   The reason that this page took so long to finish is that, unlike the previous chapter, the backgrounds in the panels of the next few pages will feature relatively static, interior shots.  I won’t get a chance to draw different stuff (like cars and buildings) to fill the backgrounds and try to make each panel look unique and interesting.  I want to avoid the old shortcuts from the class TP strips where backgrounds were just ill defined blobs (or, in some cases, just…nothing).  Back in those days I was trying my best to update 4 times a week, and corners had to be cut to keep up with that schedule, especially given that the strips were hand drawn and inked, which made art reuse painful and laborious.

This time around, I wanted to ground the scenes in real-feeling places, and avoid the cut corners.  I would rather post a new page late, and be happy with the results, than half-ass my way through it with empty backgrounds, or shapes to fill space.  So Dave and I spent a lot of time and effort on the background of this page.  It’s setting the stage for this chapter, and it needs to feel like a place.  There has to be stuff in it.  Stuff that will be shown again in future panels.  So, I spent a lot of time drawing, and redrawing, and redrawing again.  Getting things to look good enough to make me happy.  And Dave, to his credit, did a fantastic job with the color (as always).  In particular, the lighting effects in this are just the bees knees.  Check out the mix of purple, blue, yellow, and green highlights from the neon signs.  The way that the ceiling gets swallowed up in the darkness, and the foggy atmosphere.  I think he knocked it out of the park on this one.

At any rate, the extra time and effort we put into this strip will make the next few pages flow a lot faster and easier.  We won’t have to agonize over what decor to put on which wall, what colors to use, the orientation of the tables, how many aliens there should be, etc.   All those decisions are out of the way, and now we can just go with the flow.

I expect that we will be posting the remaining pages in this chapter on time over the next several weeks, though Dave has some incredibly hectic weekends ahead (with lots of travel) that may make that difficult.  I will do my best to continue Towne Pub’s new tradition of completely open honesty, and I’ll let you know well in advance if we’re going to miss a date.

As always, we love to read your comments and e-mails   Also, this Tuesday we have a particularly fun update coming.  I hope you’ll check back in.

So, yes, Mass Effect blowed up my console, and it’s been about 2 years since I played through it, which has allowed me to remember it fondly, through rose tinted glasses.  I’d honestly forgotten about many of the aspects of the game that were annoying.  I will list some of them here:

• Planet exploration.  Blah!  Upon scanning some planets you would find that you could drop your ATV to the surface and explore.  And by “explore” I mean you could drive around aimlessly trying to fill in your map and find points of significance.  The points were sometimes a batch of enemies, or a building you could infiltrate and explore.  More often they were crashed ships or rocks containing valuable minerals.   If you’re a completionist, like me, this meant you spent about 95% of your time on any given planet filling in the map, and maybe 5% actually doing something useful or fun.
• Texture pop in.  I never understood how some games could have such lengthy load times and still not manage to load high quality textures.  Mass Effect was plagued with pop-in.  It seemed like every time you loaded a save game, entered a building, or walked around a corner your screen would be full of blurry, low rez textures that would slowely, one at a time, be replaced with the high rez versions.  Yuck.
• Inventory Management.  Like many other western RPGs, Mass Effect threw lots, and lots, and lots of items at the player.  Every corpse was lootable, and containers filled with treasures were everywhere.  Unfortunately, your team had a limited inventory capacity, so eventually you’d run out of space.  Then you’d be forced to compare the stats of similar items to try to decide which ones were worth keeping, and which you could reduce to goo to make room (the goo was used to upgrade your other equipment).
• Elevator rides.  This didn’t bother me as much as it did some others, but Mass Effect tried to hide its load times by forcing the player to ride elevators from one floor to another.  The next level would load while you watched your team standing idly in the elevators, sometimes for a solid minute or longer.
• Space Exploration.  Yes, I realize that, at its core, Mass Effect is a space opera RPG and a certain amount of exploration is expected.  But the starship “mini game” was bland, and boring, and seemed like a silly way to get from point A to point B.  In other RPGs wandering through the wilderness results in random encounters, which can yield experience and treasure.  Mass Effect seemed to be trying to apply that to space travel, but forced the player to visit star systems and individual planets to find encounters outside of the main storyline.  It’s just not the same.
• Moronic companions.  I had a really, really hard time playing through the first 90% of Mass Effect.  Late in the game I realized this was because my companions were idiots.  They would blow all of their powers on anything and everything, and refused to take cover.
• The Citadel.  I have a love/hate relationship with it.  There’s very little to do there other than walk around and talk, which is great.  The Citadel is a fantastic lore dump that brings players up to speed on the Mass Effect universe.  It can also be long, drawn out, and boring.  Necessary in a first play-through, perhaps, but a huge barrier to fun in subsequent games.  It’s a giant black hole of boredom between missions.

All that being said, there was a lot that I loved about Mass Effect, not the least of which being the storyline.  Very epic.  Very well written.  Full voice for every line of dialog, and all of the voice acting top notch. I also enjoyed the game play, for the most part.  Once I figured out that I could turn off the “auto use powers” setting for my team, I really got much better at the epic battles.  Instead of having to reload and replay every fight 5 times to get past it, I was actually doing well and enjoying it.  I’ve always liked deep customization, too, so specializing in certain weapons and abilities to increase effectiveness and damage was fun, and biotic & tech powers were very satisfying.  Lots of levels, and lots of customization options also made a great role playing game even better.

Still, in the years since I’d last played, I’d forgotten a lot about the storyline, so it was kind of a blessing in disguise when I popped Mass Effect 2 in for the first time and if failed to recognize my saves from the first game.  Apparently I’d never saved after beating the game, or I had but then overwrote the save.  Thankfully I had a game saved right before the final battle with Saren, and I was able to replay through the last 25 minutes of the game.  This was a great reintroduction to the characters, and a refresher on how the story ended.

Immediately after playing through the opening sequence of Mass Effect 2, it becomes obvious that BioWare decided to take a sledgehammer to the game.  They fixed nearly everything that was “wrong” with the first Mass Effect, but in their quest to create a game that is more “shooter” than it is “RPG” they introduced as many problems as they fixed.  Additionally, the way that they chose to “fix” some things resulted in new problems that were just as bad as the original.

Wait.  Let me stop myself for a minute.  Mass Effect 2 is an incredible game. The storyline is even more epic and involving than the first game.  The twists, turns, and overall plot are incredible.  The new characters on your team even more interesting and involving.  The gameplay, while dumbed down significantly, is still pretty great.  The personalization, which actually builds on decisions you made in the first game if you import your character, is unparalleled.  The writing, dialog options, and voice acting continues to be off the charts.  I would not hesitate to recommend this game to anyone.  I would strongly encourage you to play through the first game first; some of the bomb shells in the second just won’t resonate if you don’t.  But regardless, Mass Effect 2 is one of the best games I have played in a long, long time.

So, yes, I loved Mass Effect 2.  The entire story, from start to finish, was absolutely superb, but the final act was absolutely great.  As I recruited each new character to join my crew I could not believe how attached I became to them.  Unlike other RPGs I actually agonized over who to bring with me on each mission, and routinely rotated through most of them.  Furthermore, walking around the ship and talking to the characters to probe them for more information about their feelings or their pasts was a pleasure and not a chore like it is in some other games.

But, I have to admit, I was disappointed with much of what is different about Mass Effect 2.  The creators of BioShock have repeatedly bent over backwards to insist that their game is a shooter.  System Shock 2, the spiritual predecessor of BioShock, was a first person RPG and is beloved as one of the best PC games ever made.  It was also a commercial failure.  Shooters, on the other hand, are popular!  The frat-guy crowd loves them.  So I don’t blame the BioShock guys for cutting away a lot of the RPG elements that made System Shock so unique and incredible in order to focus on the mechanics of making BioShock more like an FPS.  Similarly, the first Mass Effect game built on a long BioWare tradition of real time RPGs with deep, strategic combat that allowed the player to pause at any time, assign specific tasks to specific party members, and then watch the results play out in real time.  A system first pioneered in Baldur’s Gate, another game that is remembered as one of the best RPGs ever made, and was thrust into the third person with the original Knights of the Old Republic.  Since then, BioWare has applied the same formula successfully to Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect, but with Mass Effect 2 they pushed even farther from their roots in Baldur’s Gate and closer to typical 3rd person shooters like Gears of War.

How exactly did Mass Effect 2 do this?  A number of ways, really.  First, the way that powers & abilities work has fundamentally changed.  Using any one of a teammate’s powers resets the cooldown on all of the available powers.  This significantly dumbs down controlling your team as you can pause combat, assign them one action, and then more or less forget about them for the next 10 seconds.  I should note that your teammates are just as stupid, if not more dumb, than they were in the first game.  They often run into the thick of combat only to get gunned down in seconds, and there is no rhyme or reason to which powers they use when.  I admit that the first few times I heard Jacob say “Now nothing can touch me!” after throwing up a barrier, and then seeing him run into close combat only to get gunned down instantly, I laughed.  After that first few times, it stopped being funny.

Look, squad based shooters can be great, they really can.  If your team is highly scripted to do specific things, like in Call of Duty, or if they respond to simple commands intelligently, like in Republic Commando or Rainbow 6, then it can be an absolute pleasure to play with a couple of AI controlled team members.  But when the default action of your crew is to try to commit suicide as often as possible, and the game forces you to take fine tuned control over their abilities to get any utility out of them at all, it can be down right frustrating.  In many ways Dragon Age suffers from the same problems.  Even with the DA tactics system, something that is completely missing from ME2, I find myself having to take fine tuned control of the abilities and positioning of each party member, in every instance of combat.  Either that or I watch them blow all of their mana on stupid spells, and then die by running into a storm of fireballs.  In Mass Effect 2, I found myself forgetting that I even had team members in most firefights, choosing instead to take out all of the enemies myself.  If one of the AI crew members got lucky, that was a nice bonus.  Using the “unity” ability to bring partners back to life was a waste of medi-gel because, just as often as not, they would die within seconds again.

There are fewer levels to obtain in Mass Effect 2, with a level cap of 30, and the leveling system is dramatically streamlined.  Your crew still levels with you, regardless of whether they participated in recent missions or not.  Abilities are no longer separated into trees, where you must get ability X to a certain point before you can train ability Y.  Instead, you start with a specific set of abilities based on your template, each of which has 4 levels.  Each time you level you get skill points, which you can spend to improve one of your abilities.  By the time you reach the max level, all of your abilities will be maxed, or nearly so.  If you use the “auto level up” option, the game distributes the points evenly across your abilities, effectively increasing them all at the same rate.   You do get access to new abilities late in the game as you gain the loyalty of your crew, and they also get some new abilities as well.  But generally, leveling is a no-op; if you have enough points to improve the next skill in line, you do.  Otherwise, you wait until the next level.

Additionally, combat missions no longer award experience for accomplishments in the field.  You don’t get experience for killing enemies, hacking computers, cracking safes, or blowing stuff up.  Instead, at the end of each mission, you see a “mission complete” screen and are awarded a fixed amount of experience points.  Occasionally you will get bonus experience points for mini-missions, or based on choices you make in dialog trees.  But those are the exception rather than the rule.

The end result is that the majority of the gameplay plays out a lot more like a 3rd person shooter than the first Mass Effect.  You no longer worry about experience, inventory management, or exploration.  Maps are very linear, and other than assigning your squad to use specific powers or to take cover, in most cases you point and shoot.  It’s fun, to be sure, but isn’t implemented as well as other games where 3rd person combat is the focus.

As for the problems of the first Mass Effect, as I mentioned before, BioWare’s solutions are hit-and-miss.  Time for bullets!

• Miss! Planet exploration is gone.  Instead of driving your vehicle around the map using your radar to find points of interest, you have the “scanning” mini-game.  When you fly to a planet you are given the option to very…slowly…scan…the surface…for resources.  To do this you use a combination of analog sticks and the left and right triggers to find resources, and fire probes to collect them.  This is not the only way to get resources in the game, but it is the only way to get them in significant quantities, and therefore if you want to get all of the upgrades in the game, you must spend literally hours of play time scanning planets.  It’s fun at first, but after the 5th (or 10th, or 50th) planet, it gets really, really old.
• Hit! Texture pop-in is, thankfully, non existent.  Graphics in general are nicer to look at, a lot more solid, and a lot more stable.  Huge improvement here.
• Hitty Miss! Inventory management is gone.  There is also no longer a loot system.  In the rare cases where you find lootable corpses, weapons, safes, or containers in the field you are immediately rewarded with a new weapon, money, upgrades, or resources that you can use to build upgrades.   Weapons are permanently added to your armory, and will be available to any character that can use it.  You can equip them at the start of a mission, or whenever you find a weapons locker in the middle of a mission.  Salvage and resources are automagically “‘beamed” to your ship.  No muss, no fuss, no inventory.  At the same time, the deep, stats-based decisions of which weapons and armor to use are removed from the player.  Instead you get a generic message “this is an upgrade!”  Mostly, this is an improvement.
• Draw! Elevator rides are gone.  Instead, you get loading screens, sometimes for minutes at a time.  Is this better?  I don’t know how it would be.
• Miss! Space Exploration.  They managed to make this even worse.  Flying from system to system is still dull.  Random encounters are still non-existent.  Small planets and asteroids are just as hard to find as they were in the first game.  And now we have the added bonus of fuel, which limits the distance that you can travel without back-tracking to find a fuel depot to fill up again.  How do you make a boring, silly space exploration mini game even worse?  By forcing players to backtrack to the same spot 3 or 4 times before they can finish exploring a large system.  I like the idea of the galaxy map, but it is poorly executed here.
• Draw! Moronic companions.  Just as moronic as ever.  They still run into enemy fire and die instantly.  They still use their powers randomly, only now it’s more significant because using one power blows the cooldown on all of them.  To get maximum effectiveness you must still disable “auto use powers” and manage them yourself.
• Hit! The Citadel.  Thankfully this plays a much, much smaller role in the game.  Instead, there are several major locations throughout the galaxy, to which your party will journey multiple times to pursue the major storyline, or character related side quests.  There is still a lot of exploring, talking, and large swaths of areas where little or no combat is possible.  At the same time, however, these are dispersed much more evenly throughout the game, with missions and assignments in between, instead of being lumped all together in the first 25%.  Much improved!

So, what happens when you take a truly great game, fix some problems, overlook others, and introduce some more?  Well, if you also have an incredible storyline, unparalleled personalization, great characters, world class voice acting, and far better than average gameplay, you get Mass Effect 2.  An incredible game, with about 40 hours of play your first time through, and well worth your gaming dollar.

One last thing: buy it new.  New copies of the game come with a single use code that lets you join the “Cerberus Network.”   This will give you access to free downloadable content including new weapons, armor, characters, and missions.  If you don’t have this code (e.g. you buy the game used), you will need to pay a $15 surcharge to get access to the extra content.  In my opinion, this is a pretty clever and downright fair way to combat the plague of used game sales, and possibly piracy as well.