By Tim Stone on June 8th, 2008 at 9:45 am.
This one appeared in PC Gamer UK in autumn 06.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun
Strafe Left: The Formative Years #33
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08/06/2008 at 09:51 Nuyan says:
Poor world.
08/06/2008 at 10:03 Gap Gen says:
I don’t think I ever *quite* got this one. It’s a guy trying to run away?
08/06/2008 at 10:07 The Hammer says:
It’s just the spaces between the nuclear clouds forming what seems to be a person doing a bit of a jive.
Good show!
(also, lovely pun as part of the website’s subtitle, chaps!)
And lordy, DEFCON has been with us since 2006? Time flies…
08/06/2008 at 10:12 Lars Balker Rasmussen says:
Oh dear, I thought the recent gps-path artworks were bad. Hopefully no one ever decides that nuke-art is what the world needs.
08/06/2008 at 10:26 Five says:
DEFCON really inspires me. There should be more Armageddon games, don’t you think?
08/06/2008 at 11:07 Thomas Lawrence says:
Shades of Watchmen here, no?
08/06/2008 at 11:20 Masked Dave says:
I always thought it was forever silently screaming in horror and pain.
08/06/2008 at 11:22 James T says:
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare-drum.
Curtains.
08/06/2008 at 11:36 matte_k says:
Please don’t let Hollywood ruin yet another fine literary masterpiece with a cack-handed action movie- whilst V for Vendetta was passable in some respects, I don’t see how Watchmen is going to work…
And yes, Defcon is a prime example (along with World In Conflict) of why we need more nukes in games…
08/06/2008 at 12:11 Alex McLarty says:
I see how one nuke destroys the world, also destroys the person. Which is the world. Which is the person. Both…are…the same! Arrggg! Can’t compute!
08/06/2008 at 12:43 Meat Circus says:
Yum. Abstracty goodness.
08/06/2008 at 13:06 Thomas Lawrence says:
Those are some of my favourite panels of Watchmen, incidentally. I don’t envy the film-makers the job of trying to translate that to the screen – more so than perhaps anything before or since, Watchmen really USES the medium, is inextricably linked to it. It’s fundamentally not a film – or at least, merely taking the plot, characters and even the dialogue and filming them would still rob the work of much of its beauty.
If a film equivalent to devices such as the palindromic structure of “Fearful Symmetry”, the skilful interweaving of captions and on-panel action referring to several things at once, the continued echoing certain images in certain panels – if film equivalents can be found for all of these, it could be quite remarkable.
However, somehow I doubt we’re going to get much more than a mostly-faithful recounting of the events of the comic….
08/06/2008 at 16:13 Saskwach says:
Thomas: That’s about how I feel: some stories are too intertwined with their medium to be accurately, or even well, translated. Hence why I’m so scared of the Bioshock movie that I hear is coming.
08/06/2008 at 16:19 sana says:
Can’t really find the humour here, being the simpleton that I am.
08/06/2008 at 16:25 Kieron Gillen says:
Note to all: An editorial cartoon doesn’t necessarily need to be funny.
KG
08/06/2008 at 16:56 Ben Abraham says:
@KG Probably a bit off the mark here, but could that possibly explain Garfield?
08/06/2008 at 17:04 Acosta says:
Awesome.
08/06/2008 at 17:07 Larington says:
In fact, often times if you take Garfield out of the comic, and what he says, they can sometimes be better, theres a website somewhere devoted to the idea…
08/06/2008 at 17:08 Wurzel says:
@ Ben Abraham:
*Nothing* can explain Garfield, except maybe editor’s desire to maintain the status quo.
Also, this one pretty much perfectly captured the mood of Defcon for me. Mind you, I could never really get into Defcon much; it seemed a lot more real an atrocity than anything in first-person shooters or other RTSes.
08/06/2008 at 17:15 Nuyan says:
http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/
08/06/2008 at 17:24 Trousers says:
Oh, my GOD! Have you seen the GARFIELD movie? It’s HI-LARIOUS! There’s this part where he eats all this LASAGNA! Of course, Odie’s up to HIS old tricks!
08/06/2008 at 18:47 waffles says:
awesome. symbolic and literal at the same time.
08/06/2008 at 19:14 RichPowers says:
A round of DEFCON with RPS folks would be amazingly fun.
This is my favorite Strafe Left so far. Awesome stuff (well, not that thermonuclear annihilation is awesome, but ya know)
08/06/2008 at 21:45 Lada says:
At first sight I saw there a football (soccer for some of you) player. Maybe some connection with EURO 2008…
08/06/2008 at 23:02 cyrenic says:
Getting off-topic here, but garfield minus garfield is one of the Best Things I’ve seen on the internet in a while.
09/06/2008 at 00:51 Nick says:
“Maybe some connection with EURO 2008…”
from 2006?
09/06/2008 at 06:43 Jarmo says:
Great strip. A great idea well executed. Very evocative and sad. Rich and deep, very satisfying.
09/06/2008 at 11:11 Saskwach says:
I’m intrigued: was this little comic created from a set of planned nuclear launch in the game or some clever photoshopping?
09/06/2008 at 15:14 Feet says:
Also, what part of the world is that supposed to be?
09/06/2008 at 16:39 Fumarole says:
Sad that so many don’t seem to know Defcon. Time for an RPS article, surely? Well, another one, at least. You know what I mean…
09/06/2008 at 22:09 Chris R says:
I second the Garfield minus Garfield speech-bubbles… hilarious.
10/06/2008 at 13:59 El_MUERkO says:
432,009,209
\o/
———-
as an aside, i used to play defcon on my tv, 40″ 1080p defcon with the lights off on many a cool august night brought out the “muhahahaha” in me