Sweveham

Two pretty wedding dresses and a happy couple, it doesn't get more cute than that.
I was rather uninterested in Rhoda's and Catalina's relationship before, but this sketchbook has now made me a strong shipper of them.

Philip K. Dick is very hard to get around when it comes to science fiction. You could say that many of his ideas are ubiquitous.

Characters pointing their guns at each other willy-nilly is something that tends to annoy me in video games. If you are not going to use your gun, don't point it at something ( a rule that every reasonable user of guns follows). So it's nice to see Grace have a reasonable reaction to it in panel one.

I love the Philip K. Dick reference.
 

Agree fully. While I'm not a programmer,  such features should be able to be implemented without much trouble. Perhaps have the character lower their gun automatically when the crosshairs are pointed towards a friendly NPC (many games have something similar in which you simply can't fire your gun if it's pointed against someone friendly).  Or have character refuse to talk to the main character unless they holster their weapon first.

SECONDED.
The very minimum that should be required of ANY gun owner should be knowledge of basic gun safety. And while I do not belong to the school that says that video games are the cause of all of today's violence, I do feel that it could improve the genre a lot as a whole if shooter games became more aware of this. Not necessarily to the degree of being sermonising -- but it would be nice if gun owning heroes got small reminders of the fact that it is not necessarily a good idea to wave your gun around like a bollocking toy.

Characters pointing their guns at each other willy-nilly is something that tends to annoy me in video games. If you are not going to use your gun, don't point it at something ( a rule that every reasonable user of guns follows). So it's nice to see Grace have a reasonable reaction to it in panel one.

Of course, alcohol, like any drug, has it's benefits, otherwise people wouldn't drink it. No one denies this. For many, the intoxicating effect is simply enjoyable. It is a way of satisfying the human need for fun and escapism.
What I argue is that alcohol is one of the worse ways to satisfy this need. It is inherently risky and often destroys both mind and body.
Drinking compares badly to other, better ways of having fun, which range from talking with friends to reading books to playing video games. You will tend to be happier without alcohol. So yeah, I wouldn't recommend it.

You are not getting it. This is not about science. If this were a scientific journal, you would be absolutely correct. But it is not. It is a discussion forum about a comic where people come to relax and have fun. And it is just about as far away from fun as it is possible to suddenly find oneself in the middle of a discussion where people casually take something very traumatic for one and then turn it into idle entertainment or statistics. Especially when it turns into something that either ignores or denies one's actual lived experience.
It is my job as a moderator to keep this space as safe as possible for the people who post here. From the responses I have seen earlier, I suspect that more than one other than me have had experiences with an alcoholic family member that impacted or harmed their lives. I do not wish to hear a defence of alcohol after what it has done to mine. And I very definitely do not wish to be told that the years of pain and confusion I went through are 'a misleading anecdotal statistic', for that is most certainly outright telling me that what I have experienced and suffered does not matter.
You may not have intended that. It is still what you did. So therefore I ask you to please stop your 'scientific' treatment of this and take it elsewhere. If you do not, I shall be compelled to act as moderator. And I do not want to do that.

Indeed. In my case, it was my mother. She drank enough to ruin four lives.

If anything he's drawing attention to how ridiculous it is

Don't. Just... don't. When people have had a very bad experience with something, the last thing they need is someone telling them that it isn't all bad just because they had their lives badly damaged or ruined. Trust me on this.

Yeah, I dislike that too. As someone who grew with a drinking father, I know the horrors of alcohol all too well.
And now I realize what the game developers were thinking: they probably believe the "alcohol makes you more social" trope. That annoys me very much, because it is simply not true, end of story.

Yeah, I dislike that too. As someone who grew with a drinking father, I know the horrors of alcohol all too well.
And now I realize what the game developers were thinking: they probably believe the "alcohol makes you more social" trope. That annoys me very much, because it is simply not true, end of story.

Becoming more persuasive through drinking alcohol is really silly, I really don't understand what the devs where thinking there. As anybody knows, you tend to get less persuasive when drunk. Usually when you are trying to persuade someone through alcohol it's by getting them drunk, not yourself.
Also, isn't this the first time we seen Grace (or any of the main castmember) drinking? Granted it is only in a video game fantasy sequence, so it doesn't really count.

Becoming more persuasive through drinking alcohol is really silly, I really don't understand what the devs where thinking there. As anybody knows, you tend to get less persuasive when drunk. Usually when you are trying to persuade someone through alcohol it's by getting them drunk, not yourself.
Also, isn't this the first time we seen Grace (or any of the main castmember) drinking? Granted it is only in a video game fantasy sequence, so it doesn't really count.

Grace is being very cheerful and friendly for walking around in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, isn't she?
Also, I love how upfront this guy is about being a violent criminal. Even if he's not trustworthy, he is at least honest.

I have always had an odd love-hate relationship with Karma meters. I like the idea and it does add variation to the games, but sometimes the choices are so STUPID. For example, in classic KotOR where you play a force sensitive character you keep getting choices between Light and Dark Side. In one situation you meet a man being mugged by gangsters. You can elect to save the man (Light Side), ignore the event (Dark Side) or kill the muggers because they irritate you (Dark Side.) Okay, no problem. But afterwards you can either help the man a bit more (Light Side) or extort all his money from him (Dark Side.) Er, what?
Let's say you were trying for a Darth Vader style character feel. I can totally see him kill some muggers because they irritated him. But can I see him taking the victim's money afterwards? No. Why not? Because it is TOO SODDING PETTY. It is so much beneath Vader's dignity that it is ridiculous. And that is the problem with Karma meters. They all too often oversimplify, or worse yet, do evil for evil's own sake, purely for the muhahahaaa of it. If I play a villain, I'd like my evil to at least make sense.
This can also be a problem with Good, but in my experience Evil tends to be the more egregious of the two. (Or Light and Dark Side, or in the case of Mass Effect, Blue and Red.) Sigh.

I suppose Grace more or less has to make friends with her assailant, or at least leave him unharmed, if she wants to go through the game non-violently. From what I read, the plot basically is about finding him. So she can't take the more sensible non-violent option of staying the hell away from him, for then there wouldn't be a game.

The guy probably thought it was worth a shot...

EAT .44 MAGNUM MARSHMALLOWS!


Such as the plot of the first Half-Life game. Extremely popular FPS, but the plot is somewhat... incoherent at best. Ross Scott's excellent serial Freeman's Mind spends a good deal of time making fun of some of its worst inconsistencies. (If you should happen to try it, the first three episodes are the slowest due to basically being the very long trailer of the game, but after that it speeds up and never slows down till the end. Be warned: it is LONG. Also, you may risk laughing. A lot.)

It seems like being reborn hasn't made Helena and Demetrius any less prone to enlisting innocent others in their fight against evil. Despite the good intentions, they are not very nice people, are they?

Compared to this time, I think she was only mildly annoyed. I think the last time we saw her this angry was when she was dealing with Not-Tengu.
 
We still do not know everything about them. But they are certainly not looking good right now. Except possibly to those who would otherwise have been victims of the vampires. What truly makes what they do problematic is that they seem to have alternatives -- other mages, the DGB, the French version of the DGB -- and for some reason they are not making use of them.

It seems like being reborn hasn't made Helena and Demetrius any less prone to enlisting innocent others in their fight against evil. Despite the good intentions, they are not very nice people, are they?

It seems like being reborn hasn't made Helena and Demetrius any less prone to enlisting innocent others in their fight against evil. Despite the good intentions, they are not very nice people, are they?