On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness

So I’ve just wrapped up episode 1 of Startling Developments quirky little RPG, “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness.” For the uninformed, Startling Developments is owned by Gabe and Tycho, the artist and writer for Penny Arcade.

This game is very… unique. It’s an RPG, but shorter than most first person shooters. It was made on a budget, but it seems to have received more polish than most big-budget epic masterpieces. It costs $10, and yet I enjoyed it more than games that ran me six times that amount.

The combat mechanic is probably unlike anything you’ve played before, unless you played a little-known sci-fi title from back in the 90’s called Septerra Core, because it’s exactly like that. Each character has the option of using an item, attacking, or using a special attack, but to use any of those three you have to wait on a battle timer to indicate the character is ready. The timer for items takes each character a second or two. The attack timer is a little bit longer, but not much. The special attack timer has the longest wait, and if you don’t perform the attack properly it will fail. It’s not going to blow your mind, but it keeps the game relatively fun and challenging just long enough.

The story is an ADD-ridden little diddy about violence and dark gods. It all begins with “a perfect morning, on a perfect day, in front of your perfect house, in the mostly-perfect city of New Arcadia.” Before long, a giant fruit-raping robot has crushed your house, and you take up a rake and vow revenge. Gabe and Tycho will soon join you, and together you fight some robots, kill some hobos, assist in some urinology experiments, and infiltrate an evil cult of mimes. All along the way, the creator’s have infused their quite singular brand of humor.

One of the big ideas behind the game is that instead of charging you $50 and then dragging the RPG out for hours on end with pointless dungeon delving to give you the impression that you’re getting your money’s worth, the game only costs about ten dollars and will last about as many hours, maybe a bit more.

This game is actually only the first episode in a series, but it functions perfectly fine as a self-contained game. I would strongly recommend this with anyone that has $10 to spare. I say that, because it is available for ten dollars.

I have a job now. I park cars. Woo. I do not make enough money in a night of work to eat lunch at the restaurant I work at. This actually works out quite well, because this means that the restaurant I work at is customed by very wealthy people, and wealthy people occasionally tip well. Unfortunately, it would seem the wealthy pay very little attention half the time. All too frequently, I will be sanctimoniously handed a five dollar bill and told to “put her in a good spot” by some fellow who did not notice that the valet service costs $5.25, and my “tip” would actually be made up by the difference between that and what was paid. It would be rude to point this out, and I’m not going to call somebody out on a quarter, but it does grate the nerves that I’m paying them to park their car. Still, I’m making 7.50 an hour on top of tips, and at least once every night there’s been a fiver or ten dollar tip, and at the end of it all I usually make 20-30 bucks in tips a night.

School continues to be a royal pain in the ass. I love the stuff I’m studying, but damn it’s a lot of work. And it won’t be over any time soon. The next break I take from classes will come at Thanksgiving. My interim summer session starts the Monday after my last final, and that will be a single class, for ten hours a week. With one of the toughest professors on the face of the planet. Seriously, dude’s scary. Knows his business like some kind of genetically engineered super-professor, but he’s scary.

The Monday after that final, the summer session begins, and I will be squeezing two classes into as many months. The Monday after those finals, I start my fall semester, and I’m taking a full course load of 12 graduate classes. Once THOSE finals are done, however, I will have only two classes standing between myself and a Master’s Degree. That final semester, I should have ample time to prepare for the CPA exam, so I should be about done with school and tests by the time next year.

Theo, Evan, and Terra. If you happen to be cleaning up, and come across Stranger in a Strange Land, and it isn’t your Stranger in a Strange Land, it’s my Stranger in a Strange Land. I can’t seem to find it. Shame, too, because I’m about done with the other book I picked up that day and I’ve already figured out how everything’s going to end. If anybody’s considering reading the Mass Effect books, let me warn you that it was just a touch sloppy. Typos and grammatical errors are just a bit too frequent to forgive, even for me. The story and the action sequences are good enough, but they wasted a lot of verbiage on poor explanations of how the world works. Physical descriptions feel like abrupt asides. This guy was better off writing for game than an actual novel.

Out of deference to the antisocial teenager I was in high school, I will be going to see Dragonball: Evolution tonight. Disturbingly enough, I have found a group of people my own age that will be going with me. I’ll spare everybody the details unless it somehow impresses me, but in that case I’ll be too busy blogging about the actual End of Days to blog about its preempting signs.

Last thing: Go watch There Will be Brawl. Do it.