Penny-Arcade

Tycho: Its worst tendencies having gone dormant for months, Electronic Arts suddenly drew itself up to its full height and began a fresh round of decapitations. Over the years, we've had to hold interventions like this from time to time for the company. It is in that spirit that we open a dialogue.

A Preview

Cold Calling

Tycho: It took some doing, but the result was a convocation with true drama and gravity, like the Council of Elrond. This stalwart crew put their best foot forward, but unfortunately this exposed the foot in question to magma and licking tongues of living flame. I knew my way around the boss deck a little better this time, to the delight of my deep legion. When engaged in a campaign against that which is good and true, it's nice to know you have the support of upper management.

Gabe: Sakura-con is coming up in just about a week and Tycho and I will be there as usual. We'll be doing a panel on Friday at 2:30 and we'll have a bunch of our new shirts at the booth. You should swing by and say hi if you're in the area.Early bird registration for PAX (the only man made convention viewable from space) ends on the 31st which is only ten days away. We're already getting game independent game submissions for the PAX 10 which is great considering how early it is. We'll be taking submissions until May 7th and the top 10 will be presented at PAX. For all the details and rules for submitting your game hit the PAX 10 site. Also, if you have something interesting to say to the PAX audience or you know someone who does please hit the panel/speaker submission page and drop us a line.Earlier this week we announced the return of the Penny Arcade scholarship. This is our second year doing it and I really enjoy the process. Sifting through the candidates and choosing one is ridiculously hard but I feel like the end result is something pretty special. Basically we want you to tell us how you plan on making an impact in the game industry. We'll give the winning student a $10,000 scholarship. You can get all the details and application forms on the official site located here. As a funny aside, I actually misspelled scholarship both times I wrote it up there. Turns out there is an "a" in it. Who knew. Anyway, that seemed sort of ironic to me.-Gabe out

The Crevice

Bedrock Concepts

The Omnipresent Corpse Issue

Tycho: Gabriel apparently has a tiny boarder, a friendly creature with tidy fur content to dwell out in the garage. That certainly wasn't my experience with the genus, a tattered pageant of misery whose psychic reverberations are still being felt. I recall with unrelenting clarity the beast we secured in a humane trap, rolling and sucking air in its madness, placed on the table in a mockery of polite dinner. It had a musky, unhallowed scent like some primeval mustard, its yellow teeth so long that it could not close its own mouth. Threading its ten fine fingers around the bars, it cried out "We crawl, we swim! We nest and gnaw! We are WE, AND WE DEVOUR!"

Gabe: We have new shirts for you to buy. The first new shirt is more of a shirt refresh really. I felt like the old Fruit Fucker design was getting a little stale. I draw him different now and I thought the shirt should reflect that. You've probably heard me mention Imaginary Friends before. They've colored a lot of our projects and they've helped out with some of the artwork for our game. I was really curious what they would come up with for a Penny Arcade shirt design. They sent us this and I was fucking blown away. This might be my new favorite shirt. We've also added "playlists" to the store. They are sort of like playlists for songs only these are for comics. Right now the only two available are mine and Tycho's top five comics. Eventually we'd like to get more playlists in there from different people. I guess they were sick of hearing me talk about Pokemon, so a friend sent me some starter decks for the WoW TCG. I was reluctant to try it since I thought it would sort of be like cheating on Pokemon. Eventually I gave in though and Tycho and I gave it a try. I'm still new to the game but I've moved past the starter deck phase and I built my own deck. I wasn't sure what to do so I actually built a resto druid just like my actual WoW character. I'm really impressed with how closley they were able to make the systems in the TCG match the computer game. Abilities and classes work exactly like you would expect them to so if you are familiar with the PC game the card game makes a lot of sense. I will say that it's way more complicated than what I'm used to. I never played Magic or anything besides Pokemon so this is a huge step up in terms of complexity. I'm not sure the added complexity actually makes it more "fun" but it does make it interesting and right now that combined with my affection for the brand is enough to keep me playing it. We talked about it here in the office and Tycho said that the WoW TCG is like dinner and Pokemon is like dessert. I think that's a great way of putting it. Pokemon feels light and fun while the WoW game feels...substantial.We're going to try and get a group together tomorrow night to play the Molten Core raid deck. I'll let you know how that goes. -Gabe out

Tycho: We were recently contacted by the Make-A-Wish foundation with the news that a young man had chosen to invest his wish in us. This was no surprise. Well, a wish in Gabriel was a surprise. A wish in me, certainly - I'm an investment. Here are only a few of the things that make me such a winning opportunity:

Riveting

Tycho: It's a little inside baseball I guess, but at the same time the story was so delicious that we couldn't leave it be: a District Attorney in Texas is on trial for building himself a sweet rig on the county dime. This machine in question sports "two hard drives, seven fans, high-end video and audio cards, a wireless Internet connection and cables that glow under ultraviolet light." It's a crime, yeah, but it's an awesome crime. I make an exception for awesome crimes.

The Case Of Texas vs. KryoLord

Tycho: Echochrome is something every PSP owner should certainly check out, and it's easy to do so, at any rate its as easy to get on there as any other demo, which is to say that there are elements of dark sorcery. Creating a folder in a specific subdirectory with the title "NPJG90019" is the sort of thing a crazy person would do. That said, I have it on good authority that we will never survive unless we occasionally indulge in madness.