Wednesday , September 9 , 2009

    Posted by:

    Sarah

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What is this mysterious HISTORY of which Kent speaks? Does Brighton have a long and sordid past involving numerous mornings-after and possible STDs? Has she, on more than one occasion, suddenly stopped seeing a girl, only to have the poor girl's body be found in a ditch days later? Does she have a tendency to fall for girls who don't return her affections? No, no, it's all too macabre, too awful, too stunning to reveal!

~sjh

    Posted by:

    James

---

DUN DUN DUUUUUUN.

That above textual/musical sting seemed appropriate, given both Sarah's post up above and the ending of today's strip. Will Brighton's Tamagotchi survive? Will Brighton's sordid secret past be revealed? Tune in next time, on Dragonba...wait. Fancy That. Right. Got carried away. Anybody else ever hear the announcer from the end of Dragonball Z when they read teasers like that? No? Just me? Okay.

Anyway, sorry about the late update today. Ran into some technical problems that kept the comic from coming together. We weren't just being lazy, promise. Now when we took Labor Day off, we were being a little bit lazy then. But only then.

So I took up Final Fantasy XII again relatively recently, as some of you may have noticed if you have been following my Twitter. You may have also noticed my overwhelming and wholly righteous anger at the game's creators as well. Because only sadists would put a pentapartite (I don't even know if that's a fucking word, but it is now, because I wanted a fancy way to say "with five parts") boss capable of crippling status effects at the beginning of a dungeon, offer no save points throughout the rest of the dungeon, then drop a second boss that divides into increasingly more copies of itself and is capable of even more crippling status effects at the end of the dungeon. Apparently, Square-Enix thinks that it is fun to watch the beloved characters you've been level-grinding for the past four hours as they stand paralyzed, mute, poisoned, confused, and asleep while myriad Cthulhoid boss-level monsters gangbang them from every direction.

You must understand, I'm one of those calm gamers. Games don't get under my skin easily. I am fully aware that it's a form of entertainment, and I'm equally aware of the price I've paid for the equipment that I'm gaming on, so I am loathe to risk breaking any of it. But this game made me slam the Goddamn controller to the ground with a fury that would've made a Greek god go, "Shit, kiddo, chill" when it pulled that nonsense. I was incoherent with frustration. Nothing in my prodigious vocabulary could describe my raw irritation at being run through a deliberate and malicious gauntlet.

The really sad thing? I'm probably going to level grind those characters up a bit more and then try that dungeon again. Hell, it can really only go better the second time around.

-James