I could have taken more rigorous steps to prevent it, but circumstances have conspired to leave me in a hotel room the night before PAX, a heavy black mug of hotel cat piss coffee cooling on the nightstand while I thumb my post into the server from my mobile phone. I love to depict times like these in apocalyptic terminology, but the truth is that I love almost everything about them. I know it's ridiculous to find fault with my lot - it's boorish in a way, like complaining about the weight of your scepter. I hope it's understood that these posts are largely a pageant I hold for your benefit! I'm not actually of the opinion that staying in a hotel room on the eve of my convention constitutes "hard living."

I just read through one of the conduits of Leipzig gaming news, and was jolted by a piece of news: Xbox Live is going to be moving into classic board games.  I don't mean, like, Chutes and Ladders or some shit - though I don't doubt that GrowPot420 would snap that up on day one.  No, I mean like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone.  Pillars of the tabletop gaming community, so to speak.

This is probably the biggest news of that convention for me.  Getting people together to play these games, or finding people to play them with at all can be a trying endeavor.  This is near Goddamn optimal.

(CW)TB
 

On10.net has posted a video interview they did with us at our office a couple weeks ago. Honestly not much real information gets conveyed. The past couple months have just been nuts for us and with PAX coming up we’re just sort of loopy. You’re welcome to watch it but please don’t expect to get anything useful out of it. Also, if you are one of the few people left who has never seen us in our true forms I’d recommend staying away from this clip. Like a child who still believes in the Easter Bunny I want you to go on thinking we look just like the cartoons for as long as you can. No one wants to find out that the Easter Bunny is actually a couple of retarded looking dorks.

Ask and ye shall receive!

Just like the blistered, hungry dead, Armadeaddon itself lumbers - toward its inevitable conclusion. There are two more installments, or perhaps I should say there is one more installment and then an epilogue. Because that is the caliber of site we operate: a site with epilogues and denouements and perhaps even the occasional finale.

If you pre-registered for PAX and you have not received your pass yet, please send a mail to pax@penny-arcade.com

You can download homebrewed ROMs for the Fruit Fucker that enhance the efficiency of the feed reamer or allow you to juice via SMS. I'd read on FFHacks.com tweaking boards that the machine had an array of sensors that had no apparent juicing purpose. Of course, "hackzors" up to their spectacles in system-level code are probably the last people to read the manual.

If you'd like to submit some questions for the PAX panels next week, we won't stop you.  Indeed, we might actively encourage such a thing.

(CW)TB
 

We'll return to those two in a moment - for now, let's get a look at our supposed protagonists. What are they doing? Let's find out. Did they make any new friends?

It's "limited," but not that limited.  There's fifteen hundred of them total, if you are interested. 

(CW)TB
 

The World of Warcraft CCG is just around the corner. Upper Deck is letting us premier a few of the cards I did here on the site. The first one is the Leeroy Jenkins card.

We have done things in the past which were not "for" you, or anybody else for that matter. That isn't what's goin' on now. What's going on now is we are shoveling dense chunks of fanservice into the site's iron belly, and increased fervor in that chamber makes each comic bend and groan to please you.

You may be wondering what happened to the lever that regulates the amount of fan-service that flows into a given strip. This lever has been tugged free of the housing. You can only pull it in the open air now, and it does nothing to staunch the flow. Before this thing is over, you motherfuckers will need scuba gear.

The recently conducted Xfire chat has now been collated into this easy to digest transcript.  In case you wanted to digest it. 

In addition, the latest page of our insane Prey project has now gone online.  Just click the link on the left, for "We Have Visitors." 

Also!   Your mom is trying to get a hold of you.  You should give her a call.

(CW)TB

PAX is not the new E3. E3 failed. If someone else wants to be the new E3 they are welcome to it. They can even set up shop in the carcass of the giant and claim his power, but E3 is dead and it died for a reason. If I were them I wouldn't be in such a hurry to stuff myself in that coffin, and I certainly wouldn't boast about it.

I hate to do it but let’s talk about Jack Thompson for just a moment. He’s been relatively quite since our last encounter but with Bully on the horizon he’s popped up again. His recent appearance on G4 has everyone talking about him and that is exactly how Jack wants it. The man is a media whore and by putting him on television you’re just giving him what he wants. Not only that but G4 decided to put him on television with two people who are incapable of going toe to toe with him. Whatever you want to say about Jack, the guy is a lawyer and he knows how to handle himself in these sorts of debates. We all think Jack is nuts but Adam is the only person on that tape who comes off as being crazy. The guy can’t even preach to the choir for God’s sake. Mark seems like a decent guy and he stays calm but I don’t think he did any preparation for this. You can’t go up against someone like Jack and just “wing it”. Jack keeps is cool and essentially runs the show. G4 should have just given Jack his own half hour program. Maybe only schedule twelve re-runs of X-Play and then just slip in the Jack Thompson show.