11.19.2012 - Terrence Marks:

So to answer the questions you've all been asking:

1) Sorry about the radio silence lately. They changed my schedule at work. What does that mean for you? I've had comics written ahead so I was able to keep up. But for the first week or two, I've been mostly useless after about 8 PM, and that's when I write these updates (and come up with clever things to say on twitter - if I remember to post them the next day when people are on, I figure it's probably worthwhile.) I think I've adjusted, so I should be back to normal, such as it is.

2) I don't care for the new Paper Mario game. You fight using stickers. Each attack consumes one sticker. You can carry up to 24, at the start of the game. This turns it into an inventory management game, and inventory management games aren't fun. Ever.

More importantly, it's missing all the cool stuff that the previous games had. The main strength of the series was its humor and characters. Thousand Year Door had an amazing array of companions - the clever Goombella, the conflicted Vivian, the manly Admiral Bobbery - that provided personality to Mario's mute relentlessness. Super Paper Mario had a great cast of villains. Mario & Luigi had Fawful. Bowser's Inside Story made Bowser cool again.

This game has none of that. Bowser has no dialogue. The only NPCs I've encountered are a few dozen generic Toads. I understand that this game is not meant to be exactly the same as the previous games, but they've removed the core elements and replaced them with either generic things or unique but unpleasant things. I haven't played through all of it, but I don't care for it. If you liked the Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi series, I would not recommend this game to you.

3) Veronica is running in a non-partisan race. Besides that, You Say it First is not set in the United States. It contains its own political parties which do not correspond to American political parties (or elsewhere). It would have been more clever of me if that particular storyline had ended before November, but that is not how the scripts played out.