Penny Arcade

PAX East grows ever nearer, it’s super near right now, and our dutiful JavaScript clock is returning a value that seems almost impossible.  Maybe it is impossible.  Maybe each of my fingers is an undulating shrimp!  It’s a world of possibilities.  It’s also a world of challenges unique to my psychological profile.

Might be a good time to get The Conventionist on your phone, so that you can in engage in a kind of guided meditation.  Gird your fantasies of the event with a few convincing, factual contours.  

5th Cell is local, and they invited us out to play Hybrid on two separate occasions, but the incredible “world of possibilities” I referenced earlier did not contain an instance where we were able to actually make it out there.  I had heard, like every other person, that Hybrid was a “shooter,” which (coming from the house of Drawn To Life, Scribblenauts, and Lock’s Quest) seemed like pretty safe travels.  I probably should have assumed that when they said “shooter,” they meant some kind of multiplayer platforming action RTS.  Hybrid seems like one of those cases where the codename stuck; as a load-bearing piece of terminology, it’s well-suited.

What are these crazy 5th Cell bastards even doing here?  Robots on the ceiling?  Good Christ.  Obviously it’s not done, needs banged on for a bit, but lordy.  Assuming I survive the show, I need to set up a date with these guys that I can actually keep.

I can tell you, however, that Trenched is fucking badical.  This is something I actually know.  I don’t know how things progressed to the point where you can have Double Fine create a whole universe for you every couple Goddamned months, but it’s a world I will consent to live in.

New Penny Arcade Television is available, with a new episode of The Series called “The Expansion” which deals with lots of regular company stuff.  If you’re curious about some of the more “sausage production” elements of a site like this, dig in.

(CW)TB out.

so many people

PAX East is only a week away. Despite the much larger venue, it looks like we will once again be looking at a sold out event. There’s only 150 Friday badges left and about 400 Sunday. These will be gone before the show though, so don’t expect to walk in and buy a pass. If you want to go, get you tickets now.

If you are coming to PAX East here are some tips:

- You can grab the conventionist app for the iPhone or Android and get the entire PAX East guide right in the palm of your hand. It’s the future!

-If you are interested in any of the official tournaments at PAX, you should follow @pax_tourney on the twitters.

-Follow @pax_lines to get status updates on the lines at each of our theatres.

- In order to avoid another PAX POX, There is no hand shaking allowed at PAX. You should salute, or if you must have physical contact, bump elbows.

-You can follow @Official_PAX for general updates about the show.

- I tend not to have a lot of free time at PAX but I will have Pokemon White with me. I’ll do my best to get some battles in.

-Tycho loves to be told that he has pretty eyes.

-The full schedule as well as all our maps can be found on the PAX site.

That’s all I have for now. If you have any questions about the show you can hit the forum or tweet them @official_PAX. This is going to be an amazing show as usual. We’ll see you all in Boston!

-Gabe out

Page 1 of our new Dragon Age 2 comic is live over on the DA2 page. This is just a quick three page story that will introduce you to a couple of the main characters.

I had a lot of fun drawing this for a couple reasons. First Bioware has delivered some truly incredible character designs with this game. I got a folder full of concept art that I just drooled over for hours. My biggest gripe with the last game was that the characters and to some extent the environments looked kind of boring. That’s simply not the case anymore. In fact you might not even recognize some old characters that have been brought back but given a huge face lift.

The other cool thing about this project was I tried using as much live human reference as I could. It’s a very hectic fight scene and rather than just try and pull the moves out of thin air I looked up videos of sword fighting and even took pictures of people in the office performing some of the moves. This is like art 101 stuff I know but for me, working from models is something new. I think the end result is a much more dynamic set of pages.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Check out the first page now and check back on Thursdays for the next two pages.

-Gabe out

When I was writing it, this is what I kept thinking about:  all the times in DA where you pull back out of a combat to some kind of dialogue sequence, often one that had some humor in it, and everybody is joking, even though they are covered from head to toe in fucking blood.

It was a fun tone.  

(CW)TB