“Humans are always asking us if we ever get tired of doing “Penny Arcade,” which is a reasonable question, but from here inside the mechanism it doesn’t all hook up conceptually. It would be like asking if we get tired of eating “food.” The one thing you may rely upon when it comes to our work is that it will be

1. self-indulgent,

though it may also be gruesome or oblivious, or gruesome and oblivious, depending on the day. “Penny Arcade” doesn’t have a firm definition, it’s a container object that represents our generalized creative output. We make whatever we want to make, which (luckily for us) generally means .jpegs about videogames, but it can also be morality plays about imps and businesscats, samurai with paper tubes, technoir, or any other Goddamned thing. I don’t entirely know how it works, and I don’t entirely know why you stay, but this arrangement appears to work for both of us. And, as I have suggested on many other occasions, you can’t beat the price.”

– Jerry Holkins (Penny Arcade’s Tycho Brahe)

Do you have something that you have to get done? Anything? Then stop reading right now. Go on. Scroll down. There’s a funny Cthulhu video down there. Just leave this post alone. Go on, get.

Okay. If you’re still here, we are now absolved of all responsibility for telling you that Notch, the developer of Minecraft, the latest incredibly addictive game sweeping the internets, is offering the game free until he gets some new servers set up, probably on Monday.

Jerry Holkins (the writer of Penny Arcade, more commonly known as Tycho Brahe) shared a heartwarming story in his newspost today. A story of metal, of skill, and chance encounters of the kind that can only happen at PAX itself.

And although it was not long enough to be an epic, it was epic all the same. We’ll truncate it even further, and then get you to the videos.

Last year at the annual Child’s Play charity auction, Privateer Press, the makers of Warmachine won the right to commission a song, lyrics by Tycho, music by Harmonix, the makers of Rock Band. The song would debut at PAX, but in the run up to the show, no one in the Penny Arcade offices could find the time to play some Rockband and actually practice it. This was kind of a problem.

Last weekend Telltale Games released an inexplicable teaser trailer for an upcoming project, that primarily featured the above image, calculated to create one specific response in the viewer:

What the heck kind of game is going to have Tycho from Penny Arcade, Max from Sam & Max, Strongbad, and the Heavy from Team Fortress 2 in it?

Today, we have an answer: A poker game.

Where do you find common ground between a flash video series and a webcomic that have booth been made into adventure games; an adventure game; and a team based shooter, all of which have been created by three different game developers?

Well, we just spent five whole minutes just trying to draw an illustrative Venn diagram, and we can’t. But apparently Telltale Games can.

Christopher J. Ferguson, associate professor at Texas A&M International University has completed a study on the effects of playing violent video games on 103 frustrated young adults.

The results suggest that violent games reduce depression and hostile feelings in players through mood management.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who plays the odd video game. They’re games. But, some people who play the odd video game know people who don’t. Perhaps they’d like something to link those people to?

Read on...

The LA Times is reporting that members of the internet community Suicide Girls will be banned from having a booth at this year’s San Diego Comic Con for the first time in four years, and, though the information is murky on both sides, we’re inclined to agree with their assessment.

Comic-Con International claims that it saw evidence that adult DVDs were being sold to underage con-goers, while Suicide Girls maintains that they educate all of their con workers about proper procedure, and “instruct all girls who are present at conventions to check IDs for anyone who looks under 30. We have a large sign up at our booths that says ‘You must be 18+ with ID to purchase.’”

I’m just going to go ahead and say that I don’t understand the idea behind making games that most people do not have the hardware to play.  I’m all for graphics, when they are married to good design and good writing, but that was never Crysis‘ claim to fame.  I didn’t actually play the game, I just took Penny Arcade‘s word for it, but when Tycho says something like this:

With Mass Effect, you had amazing storytelling whose technology never quite held up its end. In Crysis, you have precisely the opposite.

Well, I think I made the right choice.

…So, there’s a trailer for Crysis 2.

IGN has uncovered Will Wright‘s next project, and it’s not a game. The king of procedurally generated content and creator of Spore and the Sim games (including Sim City, Sim Ant, and The Sims) is instead working with the former president of Nickelodeon and Spike TV to create a television series.

Well, “create” implies a certain level of completion. Wright prefers to give his audience the tools to create their own fun rather than creating a single experience. Or, in the words of Penny Arcade, this.

Read on...

The inaugural Penny Arcade Expo East sold out earlier this year, but I was never worried.  I’d ordered badges for me and my friend R in October.  And so, last Thursday, I made my way to New York Penn Station to begin my first weekend at that great gaming Mecca: PAX.

I learned a few things from my first PAX and my second con: