So we’ve decided to take a short sabbatical for November and December to focus exclusively on these new ideas, and ensure that when we return we have something that excites us, something which inspires us to work hard and become better artists and writers and all the other skillsets which go into making comics. Thank you to everyone who’s stuck with us through the past three and a half years, and when you see what we have planned, I hope you’ll be as excited as we are!

Aimed at “three-year-olds or college dorm rooms full of drunken 20-year-olds,” says Tim Schafer. Yeah. If I had either of those this would be a must-have.

First, the bad: the devs haven’t worked out how to get AI working on it, so no playing against bots to get a feel for the new map, mechanics, items, etc. When I went to check the lay of the land it was desolate, not even easily-dominated minions to squish, but after running round for a couple of minutes I felt comfortable enough to give it a try.

To follow on, the good: whereas common-or-garden League of Legends is a carefully weighted strategic affair, reading the battlefield, slowly inching forward when the chance presents itself until the inevitable moment where two teams clash and one of them dies in a shower of particle effects, on first impressions Dominion is the perfect foil to that, a frantic, chaotic dash for points, holding territory king-of-the-hill style for seconds at a time, spiralling round the outer track of the map as the opposing team lunges to neutralise your advantage. It feels like one continuous rolling teamfight, from about a minute and a half in until the destruction of one of the two nex…i?

And while it’s still riddled with the same douchecrumpets who insist on bitching about everything under the sun, it feels fresh and exciting. I’m not sure I’ll play it with the same fervour I played the original map with – it’s rather too frenetic for more than one match a night – but for now it’s an interesting alternative if I want a splash of fast-action PvP to spice up an extended session.

- For the three or four of you out there who still don’t own a copy of Portal, it’s still available free for a couple more days. At this rate, every Steam client should just come with Portal and Team Fortress pre-installed. And speaking of using games as educational aids, I haven’t checked out the Minecraft teacher for a while…

- Shameless plug time: Moving away from gaming for a moment, I want to mention my new audio project, Postcards From Lepari. Every day I’m writing, producing & podcasting a short piece of fiction , two-minute snapshots of a city on the verge of revolution. Stop on by and have a listen, and let me know what you think.

It’s also a marvel of technology and convenience, bringing creative people together and giving us a stronger sense of community than perhaps we’ve had at any point in history. And when it takes me thirty-two seconds to find a perfectly serviceable facsimile of the Gears font created by a fan, download, install, and be ready to add the finishing touches to this week’s comic, I can’t help but be impressed.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Over the last few months, our attention’s been taken up by planning and execution, logistics and tradition. No one warns you that you’ll be spending an immeasurable amount of brain energy debating things like the merits of importing regional sausages, or whether that Muse track is twenty-one seconds too long for the reception playlist. While we’ve been managing to get comics up (barely) on time each week, we let posting regular updates and opinion articles on the blog slip.

All that effort culminated this weekend in a fantastic day with good friends, blah blah blah… but the point is, we’ve missed Gen-1 and we’ll be making every effort to get back to normal over the next few weeks.

So when Jenny asked me last winter whether I would like a scarf, my first reaction was to reach for a 2B pencil. And this was the result:

When I posted this image on Twitter last week, it generated considerable attention, so as a follow-up I thought I’d make a quick post about the design. Let me stress, first of all, that I know only just enough about the actual process of knitting to know what can and can’t be done. There are plenty of good video tutorials on how to knit, covering everything from the basic mechanics to more complex techniques like intarsia – creating patterns with multiple colours to form the creeper’s face above – so I won’t go into the actual process here. If you have any recommended tutorials, feel free to post them in the comments.

As pixel-art designs go, the Creeper pattern is a fairly straight-forward one to start with. It’s already visibly divided into pixels, and can be created with the use of just two colours of yarn, black and green. The real creeper design actually uses four or five different shades of green, but unless you have the patience to switch between balls of yarn every four or eight stitches for the entire length of the scarf it might be better to either pick a single colour of green or use a variegated green yarn as we did here.  You can see the pixel design over to the right; 8 pixels across gives us enough resolution to render the whole of the creeper’s face.

Given that this scarf was knitted entirely in knit stitch – keeping things as simple as possible – the question then becomes how many stitches should make up a single pixel? When we designed this pattern we estimated that a pixel should be a 4×4 block of knit stitches. However, it became obvious as Jenny started knitting that stitches aren’t necessarily the same size horizontally and vertically. I suspect this may be something that varies depending on your individual knitting style, but in this case we ended up creating each pixel as 6 rows of 4 stitches each.

Guided by this principle, the first 12 rows (2 vertical pixels) are each constructed of 32 knit stitches (8 horizontal pixels) of green, before we start having to worry about the added complexity of intarsia knitting the black yarn into the pattern. The next 12 rows are 4 Green, 8 Black, 8 Green, 8 Black, 4 Green, to make the eyes.  The third set of 12 rows is 12 Green, 8 Black, 12 Green, followed by 12 rows of 8 Green, 16 Black, 8 Green. Finally 6 rows of 8 Green, 4 Black, 8 Green, 4 Black, 8 Green finish off the face.

That’s the tricky bit done; after that, just carry on down with the green yarn until the scarf is as long as you want it or you run out of yarn. There you have it; a creeper to call your own, to gently warm your vulnerable neck with its soothing hiss.

With Bastion last week and this today, it’s been an excellent summer so far. And if you haven’t played the Bastion demo, you’re a bad person.

Still, the potential for reinterpreting fan favourites is huge. And just like Ehrgeiz and Dissidia and all the others over the years, I’m sure Teatree Ritalin will sell a bundle whether it’s any good or not.

By the torrent of vitriol spewing across comment threads and forums like a deleted scene from The Exorcist, I assumed something distinctly nefarious had been uncovered, foul play of the highest order. This crime against humanity?

No deleting of save files in Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D. A game which exists purely as a high-score challenge, a playground of levels, characters and weapons to play in an odd moment here and there. A frivolous bit of fluff to while away the hours until titles worth playing emerge for your nascent handheld.

The thrust of the argument seems to be that Capcom are screwing over pre-owned players by preventing them from playing it as-new. So there’ll be someone else’s score on the boards? Someone else will already have gone through the onerous bullshit required to unlock all the fun stuff? This isn’t Capcom denying you the right to progress through a narrative, nor locking significant chunks of content away if you dared not to thrust your wallet, cards and all, into the gaping maw of the preorder system.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t support the lack of a reset option as a design decision, but this is hardly the first game in history not to have the means of resetting high score tables and unlockables. The original Smash Bros had a similar system, and no-one batted an eyelid. The real issue here – lost amongst the mad ravings of the oft-infuriated – is not that Capcom may or may not be trying to deincentivise pre-owned sales, but that the handheld game they’re selling as a fully-fledged experience is nothing more than a couple of bonus modes tacked together with a shiny 3D wrapper.

Whether that’s enough will be up for the market to decide. If not, I doubt the onerous prospect of wiping buttmuncher69′s scores off the leaderboards will deter many from saving significant wads of cash as the market floods with used copies. And there’ll be nothing Capcom can do to change that.