telcus

The road to S Ranks marches on and on. I'm continuing on from last time with the second instalment in the Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice
of Darkness games. Just as before, I played this game when it came out on Steam (twice actually) and this run is to finish off those last pesky achievements.

The second Penny Arcade Adventures episode is, like all sequels should hope to be, a better game than the first. The game itself is longer and the areas are more distinct and interesting. The combat has improved with the quick time events to fire off your special attacks now a lot more timer based, making them more of a challenge to pull off than the first game. There is also a larger variety of foes to bash with your fists/guns/garden implements and the mini-games and puzzle sections are spaced through out the entire play through. The writing is still quintessentially Jerry with genuine wit and the artwork and cut-scenes are done nicely in the Penny Arcade style. There is even a new game mode called "Insane" where the enemies don't telegraphs the block times for an extra challenge. All in all a solid improvement in most areas.

I say most areas because there is one part that really holds the game back and can lead to much swearing and gnashing of teeth. Somehow they managed to completely screw up the controls. As I said, the game is more timer based than the first one and the controls do not give you enough fidelity to deal with that. I kept missing blocks and firing off my big attacks because sometimes the game would completely fail to register my button presses. This is not cool when you need to kill enemies on a perfect special attack to fill your overkill meter (which nets you a permanent increase in damage) and completely shout-out-loud frustrating for one of the achievements I was missing on which I'll discuss, at length, later. Maybe it's just my PC that was causing this issue, but the first game did not have this problem so it can't be all me....can it?

Enough of my moaning. The game is still a hoot to play if just for the humour, writing and art. Plus, even with the messy controls, it's not a terribly hard one to finish in any case. It's been a while since I played it last but I'm pretty sure I finished it on Insane so I can't complain too much.

On to the achievement farming!

I had 4 missing achievements (Reluctant Hero, Pack Rat Strikes Again, Power Surrrge! and Pervert) and set about to get them with gusto, starting from the beginning with my S-Ranker from the first game. Reluctant Hero was literally completed in the first minute. You just have to refuse to go start the first mission 5 times, which feels like a nod to the old "But thou must" scenarios of the classic Ultima conversation trees.

Pack Rat Strikes Again was done soon after. Unlike the Pack Rat of the first game, which was to find all the collectibles in the game), this achievement just requires you to win a fight using only items. Quite easy on the memorable fruit "loving" robots. They are weak against the dynamite item and so go down before you really have to do worry about the caveat that you can't counter-attack.

Power Surrrge! is the current holder of my "Most Loathed Achievement Award" but I'm sure it will be knocked off soon. To get this you have to Max out one party member's hit counter. Each time you hit any enemy your hit counter goes up. If you fail to block an attack properly, your hit counter resets. Performing counter attacks are even better because they not only stop your counter resetting but they add to your hit counter as well. This is where my complaint about the controls comes to the fore. I first tried to do this achievement as part of the entire achievement collecting run. During my achievement run of the first episode I actually maxed my hit counter without specifically trying to so I thought it might be doable here. However, after multiple times when my hit counters were in the high twenties to thirties the game would either fail to register my block completely or delay it ever so slightly (okay this might be my fault, the jury is still out). I shouted, swore and then gave up in disgust and played Borderlands for a week. I refused to drop the difficulty down to easy on principal and so when I came back to this run I saved after every fight where I didn't lose my hit counter and reloaded if I got screwed over in the next. This ended up being the ticket to get this stupid achievement and I embarrassed myself by doing a fist pump when the little notice came up. Good thing no one was around.

Finally, Pervert was another easy badge to round out the game, just requiring me to click on a sensitive part of a stuffed rhino 5 times after a specific plot event. Huzzah! Done! I still played to the end though just for closures sake.

Well that does it for the Penny Arcade games. The second one implies there will be a third game in the series. It has yet to come out and judging by what I've heard from Jerry and Mike about how they feel about game development now they have actually tried it, it may never. That's a real shame if it is so because the series deserves at least an end to the excellent story and setting they've concocted.

Regardless, there are still plenty of games on my list to meta-play for achievement whoring glory!

 One of the first things I noticed on creating an account on GiantBomb and synching my XBox360 and Steam achievements is the interesting way it tracks completion of games. Assigning a rank to your current achievement level adds yet another motivator to get those few final achievements to push from A to S Rank. So I had a look through the games I have currently and tried to see what would be a good starter to "complete" the game. A nice and easy one to start off with, Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode 1 on Steam.

Penny Arcade is the online comic phenomenon created by writer Jerry Holkins (Tycho) and artist Mike Krahulik (Gabe). This is an interesting title if just for the fact that the premise of its development was that two "game critics" would themselves be creating a game. The writing in this game is fantastic and very true to the feel of the Penny Arcade comics. Tycho has never been shy about his love for the English language and the thematic vision that is presented in the game of a kind of steampunk-cthuluesque mixture have popped up before in his thrice-weekly ramblings on the Penny Arcade site. The art style is also very much Penny Arcade at the time it was made. I say at the time because Gabe's artwork is in a constant state of evolution and self improvement that has seen his talents grow and grow.

Sadly the gameplay of this first episode was what let it down for me, proving that talking about something is always easier than doing it yourself. The combat is timer based, so you use items for each of your party’s characters first, then your regular attack and finally a special or a group attack if you wait long enough. Special attacks require the successful completion of a minigame (different for each character) such as timing spacebar hits or pressing the right combination of WASD keys. You can also block incoming attacks if you click the spacebar at the right time......and that's about it. Nothing particularly challenging pops up and you can also use the fact that your timers keep filling up while you perform attacks and that your attacks always take priority over the enemies to keep them locked down for a good portion of the fight.

Taken as a whole though, the game is an entertaining and funny romp through a rich and obviously well thought out universe.

Back to the achievements. I had 2 achievements left to complete to get my S Rank. Pacifist requires me to win a fight using only counterattacks (a block at exactly the right time triggers these), health items, or distraction items. Pack Rat is for finding all the hidden collectibles in the game. I decided to fire up a new game to get these two because enemies do not respawn so you cannot get Pacifist on a completed game. I hadn't played this in a while so the first thing I noticed is that you can now choose the game difficulty, a nice touch which was back ported from the second episode.

I ended up getting Pacifist on the second attempt at it because the first attempt I misread the rules of the achievement and used an item on an enemy to lower its defense. Still, this achievement was annoying because the enemies kept using ranged attacks and only one of your characters can counterattack ranged attacks. After what seemed like forever of pressing spacebar, I killed the last mime (yes mime) and scored the achievement.

Pack Rat was even more of a pain because hidden items in the game require you to click on a certain part of the world (such as a mailbox or a poster), reducing the game to a clickfest as I tried to find all these artworks and albums. I had already found all the artwork in a previous game, but that was so long ago that I had forgotten where they were. So by the time I got to the final boss it was stupid o'clock in the morning and I was still down one artwork and two albums. A quick check on old faithful (the Internet) revealed the location of these final items, with the last album given when you defeat the boss.

Finally I had a completed scoresheet and the bonus of the realisation of why I did not have any 100% achievements before today. It's because some of them are just terribly boring to get. Still...onwards and upwards as they say.