Adventures in Monopoly

Header pic has nothing to do with this comic. Header pic was based off an old John Varley story. My sister had gone to Germany, and she brought me back a German Monopoly set, so it was always going to eventually show up here. The German set didn’t have metal playing pieces. The German dialog is from Young Frankenstein. I’m pretty sure it should be “Lass ihn” instead of “Lass im”. The Latin bit is the Dies irae, and I probably used it because of Mozart writing music for it in “Amadeus”. This comic is just a bunch of stuff I had lying around the house and in my head :-) ...

The first part to the comic in the header image was over here, and the second part was right over there. In this comic, I’d finally realized that poor lighting wasn’t something I could fix in Picasa, and what I really needed was just a lot of lights. I’d started buying custom fonts to give the comic a better feel and to make it legible at different resolutions. The font of the words “Adventures in” in the first panel was the font I bought to do Wizard101 comics, as that’s the font that game uses. ...

The first panel of this header comic was posted last week, and the third part will be posted next week. They were used in one of my old Daily Blogrolls :-) Darkfall was a huge game when I wrote the next three comics. It was developed by Aventurine in collaboration with the government of Greece; I believe that was the first time a state entity was involved in the creation of a MMO. Sometime later, the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (its actual name) would go on to drop 75 million dollars into 38 Studios’ unreleased MMO, Copernicus. ...

Turns out that everything that ever happened in online games happened first in Monopoly. They said the Monopoly Cash Shop would only sell cosmetic items – sure. That’s how it starts. Was still figuring out how to do a comic, so still a little rough. I eventually dropped the “Comic Filter” and vastly improved the lighting.

A long, long time ago, I got a shiny metal bear in an EverQuest 2 expansion box. I kinda thought it looked like it could be a piece to a Monopoly game, so I took out my Monopoly board and played around with it a little… and the characters took on a life of their own. I don’t know what happened to Dire Bear. The rest of the crew are still in the Monopoly box, but I must have set Bear aside somewhere. I’ll find him eventually, and maybe there’ll be new stories for the crew to tell. ...

I read on Twitter today that Daybreak Games had bought out another studio, Cold Iron, who are working on a game set in the Ridley Scott “Alien” universe. The developers had previously worked on City of Heroes, Champions Online and many other MMOs. That reminded me of a comic I made back when Champions Online was in beta… There seems no better time that to start picking up content from my old blog, West Karana. So here’s a couple comics I made once. ...

I’m driving to Virginia today to visit my son. So I’ll be gone a couple of days, but the Adventures in Monopoly crew have been playing Scrabble, and came upon an interesting board position. So while I’m gone…. What was the last piece placed? In what order were the legal plays made? If Bear moved first, who won? See you Wednesday! (Update: a couple possible answers in the comments)

Thanks to @caffo for the inspiration. He posted up a picture that said “For the first time in my life I was happy. Then I realized it was all the caffeine,” with a dozen cups of coffee. So I was going to have the AiM crew do a podcast, where they spent most of the time talking about their cups of coffee while completely ignoring the Monopoly game going on all around them… and it kind of grew from there. ...