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When you’ve been making fun of the video game industry as long as Penny Arcade’s Jerry “Tycho” Holkins and Mike “Gabe” Krahulik have been, deciding to create your own game is one ballsy move. You have to know that every review site you’ve ever trashed and every developer you’ve viciously sodomized with your barbed wit is watching your every move, desperate to see you stumble so they can get in a few licks.

Undaunted, Penny Arcade and Hothead Games now brings us chapter one of Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a Lovecraftian period role-playing game in four parts. Is it an adventure strong enough to weather the ensuing critic-storm, or will it crack under the pressure, spiraling slowly into madness? Read on, brave adventurer…

Loved

The Story: It’s H.P. Lovecraft meets Monty Python, complete with ancient gods, dark rituals, clowns, hobos, and evil mimes. Two great tastes that go surprisingly well together. Being able to create my own character who features prominently in the cutscenes really made me feel like I was part of the twisted tale.

The Combat: It’s as if they took the best bits from several RPG’s and tossed them all together, adding their own unique spin. You get standard attacks, super moves that rely on mini-games (one rather similar to Shadow Hearts’ wheel mechanic), timed blocking, and support characters that can unleash devastating and not-so-devastating attacks. It’s an issue of Popular RPG Mechanics.

The Humor: To be honest here, I am a big fan of the Penny Arcade web comic, and that same style of humor oozes through every pore of PAA. It can be a bit hit or miss at times, but I found myself at least tittering to myself a good 80% of the time, with a few definite LOL moments. “WTF.”

The Brevity: With RPG’s getting longer and longer with each passing year, it’s quite refreshing to be able to sit down with a game in the genre and be finished in 8 hours.

The Music: The instrumental music by Jeff Tymoschuk captures the off-kilter atmosphere of the game quite readily, but the ending credits song “Final Boss” by MC Frontalot steals the show.

Hated

The Environments: While the various settings in the game are well-detailed and crafted lovingly, there are only four of them, with one of those consisting of a single room. I wanted to see more of the world.

The Item Collection: The game would have benefited greatly from some sort of item store. As it stands, using up all of your power ups during a difficult fight leaves you running back through the stages whacking trash cans in order to rebuild your supply.

Easy Peasy: Enemies are on screen for the most part, allowing you to avoid them while you hunt for items to help do them in, and your health replenishes completely after every battle, making the game a bit easier than I would have liked.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness is a game lovingly crafted for fans of the web comic, so it goes without saying that if you despise Penny Arcade and all they stand for then this is probably not the game for you. If you are a big fan, then by all means, pick the game up. Even if you aren’t big on the RPG format, it’s packed with tons of trademark PA humor that anyone who follows the comic shouldn’t miss out on.

With that in mind, I found On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness to be a wholly enjoyable experience and an excellent beginning to the Penny Arcade Adventures saga.

Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness was developed by Hothead Games, designed by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. Retails for $19.95 or 1600 Microsoft points. Available on Xbox Live Arcade, PC, Mac. Played to completion.

A new trailer was released yesterday for Guitar Hero World Tour. This trailer focused on the new drum kit and had a few celebrity drummers testing out the new kit and giving their opinion.

The drummers were Stewart Copeland from the Police, Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and most notably Travis Barker from Blink 182.

We say ‘most notably’ because, in the trailer, Barker can be seen wearing a motion capture suit. A motion capture suit is used in video games to capture movements for characters within in game. In the Guitar Hero series, motion capture of musicians has been limited almost exclusively to those who will be a ‘boss’.

While the video did not expressly state that Barker would be a boss in the game, Barker did mention that he was using the drums to compose. Given the mention of composition and that he was wearing a mo-cap suit, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that Guitar Hero World Tour will not only feature ‘Drum Boss Battles’, but that Travis Barker will be one of the bosses.

Read the full story over at consolehero.com: (more…)

Gametap.com’s editorial and video departments are no more.

Media mogul Ted Turner pulled the plug on the site’s editorial and video departments and pink-slipped the staff, although the core of the site –subscription downloading of PC games– will keep running. “GameTap TV” original programs will apparently no longer be produced either.

GameTap Vice President of content Rick Sanchez said, “While we have been very happy with the work done by our editorial and video teams, we’ve made a decision to focus the business on our biggest strength, which is our game catalog. As a result, we will be restructuring the site to focus exclusively on gameplay.”

Wired: Turner Pulls Plug on GameTap Editorial, Sacks Staff

The videogame version of the Score internationals Baja 1000 desert race promises to give gamers a chance to participate in blistering, sun-drenched endurance races without ever leaving their climate-controlled living rooms.

According to Activision, the game features:

Over 90 vehicles across multiple classes… including trophy trucks, class I, motorcycles, ATVs and more – the game challenges players to not only be first across the finish line, but also keep their machine intact! Hyper-realistic dirt and damage modeling in the game means players need to be crazy enough to take chances, but not so reckless that their vehicle is destroyed before the race is over.

Developed by Left Field Productions, the game will be available this fall for the PlayStation 2, Playstation 3 , Xbox 360, Wii and PC. There’s a single, lonely screenshot over on G4tv.