Ye Olde Towne Pub

Once again, Powers provokes thoughts in his comments to today’s new strip:

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!

Short Version: Deeply flawed and disappointing, especially in the first third of the game.  Fortunately, things really begin to pick up in the final two acts, and the game ends with a satisfying conclusion.  Couple a much better-than-average story for an FPS with the (sometimes too) familiar game play of the first BioShock and the result is a game that is definitely worth 10-15 hours of your time.  The new “Little Sister’ mechanic is so good that I can’t help but wonder what they will do in the inevitable BioShock 3 to replace it (assuming that you won’t be playing as a Big Daddy again).

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.