On the Precipitation-Lubricious Cliff of Legitimate System Requirements

I, like many gamers, am a fan of Penny-Arcade. Not a huge fan or even a big fan, but I'll admit that I check for new strips a minimum of once a week. One thing I have to give them absolute credit for is rabid devotion to, and love for, videogames. It only makes sense, then, that two guys who so love and understand videogames would pour their sweat, blood and all manner of other bodily fluids into making the best game imaginable. "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One," is the result of their toil and I figured I should at least give the demo a shot.

Unfortunately, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag; upon installation I tried to run the demo at the default settings and beyond the usual torrent of developer and game logos I was treated to a black screen and no hard-drive activity. Being a long-time PC gamer I've become accustomed to this sort of occurrence and often as not, simply rebooting the system after an installation will help motivate an application to work properly. After alt-tabbing out of the blank screen and restarting my system I dropped the graphic settings to a mere 800x600 resolution and started the game up again and sure enough, I slid uninterrupted through the opening sequence into the character creation menu where I was pleased to find that whatever character you create, it looks like Mike Krahulik drew it straight onto the screen. In fact, the whole game looks like it came straight from the panels of the comic strip. Krahulik's signature look has been masterfully transferred to the third dimension and what the game lacks in graphical capabilities is made up for with style. This approach is similar to what has been done with the episodic Sam & Max, Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Battlefield: Heroes, (among others), and one of the results of such a design formula is that the games don't look dated, yet run on a wide variety of systems including PCs long overdue for an upgrade. You might understand why I was shocked when I ran into more performance issues.

The game ran like a fat guy trying to make it up a flight of stairs after a trip to Dairy Queen. I'm talking anywhere from three to ten frames per second. The laptop I'm playing on is by no stretch of the imagination a machine designed for gaming, but I can pull solid framerates on Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted at higher resolutions so I was not expecting this low-tech episodic demo to be a slap in the face along the lines of Crysis. For a game such as this to run this poorly at 800 by 600 pixels is absolutely inexcusable, especially when my system meets the recommended system requirements. I would love to speak right now about the gameplay and the writing and one would hope the great sense of humour but the game just doesn't have quite the same flow when the mouse cursor, (the primary method of controlling the game), is either moving like molasses or jumping across the screen.

Stylistically the game is fantastic, a shame it wouldn't run properly
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As I said previously, I can't give my impressions on the game when running under ideal conditions. As a guess I'd say that if you are a fan of Penny Arcade, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is something you'll want to check out at least. I would only warn you that if you plan on playing the PC version and you have even the slightest doubt as to whether you can run the game smoothly, you would do well to try the demo before you drop twenty big ones on the full version. Until game companies start listing realistic minimum and recommended system requirements that's the best way to find out if a PC game is right for your rig.