The game, not the town.

It's generally my task to test games which require advertising space, and I had been putting off Dragon Nest because I had a ton of shit to do, and also because I play a lot of these games and I sort of felt like I knew what I was in for. To jump immediately to the end of the story, I was deeply, deeply wrong. It hews closer to the MMO standard than a game like Spiral Knights let's say, but it's very much an action oriented approach: it's like some wicked brew of Phantasy Star Online and Lord of the Rings. The surprise was pleasant.

I sometimes wonder if PAX is a thing I will ever be able to contain in my head. The comedown is usually pretty hard: I spend a lot of time sitting quietly and staring forward, dimply aware that a child is tugging on whatever textiles I have managed to drape over my vile and bulbous frame. I spend three or four days at such a level of physical and psychic availability that for days afterward everything is just sort of ringing and raw. I have said on many occasions that we are not well suited to this task, and perhaps could not be, as men who spent their formative years in abject terror and subjugation; we are people suffused with a natural unease, each of us literally medicated for our demons. But noone else wants to do it, or noone else can. It's possible that our damage has pounded us unto whatever shape is necessary for this. I'd be lying if I said I understood it.

We are also doing some kinda PAX thing downtown, I guess? Should be pretty cool.

After you've been matchmade in League of Legends, you move to a screen where you can watch each player's loading bar creep up as you enter the game. It seems like this would be a boredom factory, but it's actually alright: this is the first time you're able to see your opponents in a normal game, so it's typically a flurry of "oh no's" and "not him's" and so forth. You use this time to crank up a kill order on the opposite team, talk about item builds, and so forth. This is something that can keep you occupied for, oh, maybe a minute or so.

The Penny Arcade store will have a bunch of cool stuff this year at PAX.

Deus Ex has questions, certainly; that is its basic idea. It has questions about things, and for you, and it also trains you to ask questions of your own about the spaces you inhabit and the events that transpire there.

Can be found here. I think you may find it... trenchant.

The Decide-O-Tron is essentially Pandora for games, that's about as clear as I can make it. It can very quickly build a library of the games you like and own, and then - just as quickly - tell you what you should play next. It will be available for iOS devices, and it will be free.

The story more or less from the beginning of the Xbox 360 has been about Japan. In an unguarded moment, you might hear a person from Microsoft (who should probably know better than to talk to me) wonder aloud whether it's possible to succeed in this business without Japan. They are asking it in a way that implies they have already answered this question for themselves and, indeed, answered it in the affirmative.

Oui.

Writing the backstory for Mojang's Scrolls has been the most fun I've ever had

Watch live video from Penny Arcade on www.twitch.tv

PAX is just a week away and I have a few important bits of info.

The four we chose for the strip literally the first four that came to mind; in no way does this sample represent every savage threat trying to push its face through the rapidly thinning membrane. It’s true what "Tycho” says in the first panel: our ability to afford these free games is evaporating with great speed, and as the players start emerging from the ranks of Triple A brutes, the stigma this genre once had is being dismantled on the daily.

I don't mean that I just dug a new trench or something. Strip! It just occurred to me that there are new Trenches strips on every day that begins with T. If you'd like a less fanciful method of tracking updates, of course we do have a feed available.