Trouble Down Pit

Hi! Here’s Monday’s comic!

I really enjoyed drawing this one; there’s something about a pretentious ninja that I really like.

‘Twas a good weekend for me: on Friday I picked up a £12 copy of Rogue Trooper for the PS2 (UK link, US link) so I played that for most of the night. I’d forgotten just how much I love the character, so I may well be getting some of the old comics soon… The gameplay is solid, the voice-work is good. It’s pretty standard stuff for a third-person shooter, but well made and satisfying. Something I’ve come to realise as my gaming tastes mature is that I don’t need to always be playing the best games ever made, just things that have had care taken over their design.

Yesterday I was playing a mission in a city, I looked up at the buildings and had to stop for a moment and admire the view. It really was a work of art; the two buildings that I could see were gently curved in some utopian ideal of what would make a city a good place to live, then onto these ideals had been welded signs for strip clubs and spare biological parts surgeries, and over those was propaganda for the oppressive government forces. The history of the location and society was summarised neatly in a single view. This could easily have been described in a cut scene, or by one of the troopers telling it to me over the radio, but why bother when you can say it all with architecture? Now that’s good design!

Saturday I drew comics, studied a particularly badly argued essay for my thesis, drank beer in the evening and played more games. If you take off the beer, the same pattern was repeated on Sunday. I really enjoyed it!

While I’m posting, for the sake of UK people it might be worth highlighting something about the prices of Lost Season Two box sets: in the UK this season has just finished, and on Amazon.co.uk the S2 box set costs £42 UK link, but in the US it costs $37 US link, that’s about £18. Even after the shipping, it’s still going to be cheaper to buy from America! The moral is, if you want box sets or DVDs, get them from the US. It’s way cheaper than the ridiculous prices we pay in this country. You never know, maybe it will help sort out the sorry state of the US economy too!

Lost is the crack cocaine of television. You think you can try it once and then stop. You always say afterwards ‘this is nonsense, that’s it, I’m never doing that again’ but you always come back. Maybe this time they’ll tell you why a pterodactyl has stolen Hugo’s feet, or why nobody has mentioned Charlie’s similarity to a hobbit (‘who cares about “Driveshaft”, you look just like that bloke in those films – Oo precious!’), or why Locke’s wheelchair disassembled itself overnight to spell out the words ‘gnirreh der’ across the beach? Aargh! What does it all mean?

Don’t forget to click to comic vote box below this post! See you on Friday!