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

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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.

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I’ve talked before about the way advertising works being a little different on PA. Tycho and I have to approve any ads that you see here on the site. For games that are still a long ways off we try and get early builds. For existing games one of us always checks it out first. We try very hard to make sure that we’re showing you stuff that’s actually worth checking out. We also do the Penny Arcade presents projects. That includes things like the Assassins Creed pre-order poster, or the Dragon Age comics. One thing we don’t do is sell space in the actual comic strip or the news post. That means that when you see a bunch of comics about League of Legends it is because we are playing it every night and having a blast, not because we got a check.

When discussing today’s digimal realms, and the dangers which lurk therein, the general response (and one we have relied upon with great frequency and considerable flourish) is to lay the task of pruning an increasingly horrifying world at the foot of the parent. I’m not saying that this is wrong; who else would do it? Who else could? But I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not possible to hermetically shield these organisms. For one thing, they need oxygen.

I love this kind of stuff.