posted
I don't know if there's a specific game this one is referencing, but at the very least it parodies the sort of level design where you tend to get levels that are interesting to play through, but are absolutely absurd when used as their supposed main function.
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posted
The first one mentioned is referencing Metroid Prime 3 and the humor arises from the design of the levels and puzzles.
The second one is referencing the new FPS "Bioshock", and the moral/weirdness of either saving or killing little possessed girls that carry valuable genetic material.
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There is a section in the game where the person you are playing activates one of her signature capabilities, and the mysterious physics-defying capacity of the suit you are wearing turns you into a tiny sphere which can roll around. At one part of the game, in order to access the lower level of a temple you are in, you have to turn into a sphere, roll into a rhino statue, and then blow up the interior so that it activates and essentially falls down a pit. This is the method by which the basement of this temple is accessed.
The comic starts by showing a hypothetical discussion between aliens that built the temple. The joke is in trying to explain the extended weirdness of the game puzzle by postulating that it is purposefully how basement access was made in the temple, as opposed to putting in some stairs or something. It's true, when you think about it -- a lot of these buildings that you have to navigate as puzzles make no sense from a design or accessibility standpoint. Ha ha.
In the Ken Levine game, Bioshock, one of the game's moral challenges involves little girls, known as the Little Sisters, which are repositories of a substance called ADAM that is essentially vital to your survival. The Little Sisters are normal girls who had been transformed into autonomous harvesters of ADAM. Each one is protected by a similarly autonomous, drone-like human that has been irreversably transformed into a 'Big Daddy,' a hulking, lumbering servo-beast in a pressurized suit that will unapologetically and messily kill you if it catches you messing with the little sister it has been tasked with protecting.
You, the player, have a moral dilemma. You can harvest the ADAM, in the process killing the Little Sister, or you can rescue the Little Sister and only get half as much ADAM and end up suffering for your choice to do so. Players have to decide whether they're going to kill off the Sisters in order to be more powerful and be more able to survive.
In the TV show "To Catch A Predator," the ambush journalist sits down with the pedophile that they've lured into the house and confronts them with logs of their chat activity with the girl they thought they were going to meet when they came to the house. They come up with implausible excuses. In this comic, Tycho is combining both entities and inside the game he's being confronted by the reporter for getting caught wanting to 'harvest' the Little Sister's adam, pretending that they were just going to 'look at some fish' (the implausible excuse) and then starts trying to back out of the interview in a hurry, straight into the hulking big daddy tasked with protecting the Little Sister. Implied conclusion: messily killed. Ha ha.
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posted
I don't know how often you read Penny Arcade, but they're almost always in reference to some newly released game, or some gaming news and/or gaming culture.
So, for the most part, if you don't know what they're talking about the comics aren't terribly funny.
But if you do, they're great.
But yeah, do read the newsposts. They clear things up on the ones you don't know about.
Oh, that Metroid Prime 3 comic is absolutely hilarious. For those of us that have played Metroid games.
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