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The final Omegathon challenge was ... [update 1]
Tetris! But not just any version of Tetris. They chose the illegal, unauthorized Tengen version, the only NES variant with 2 player support. The winning Omeganaut, LeRoy, bested his challenger in a best out of three before claiming his prize: a tricked-out Scion. PAX loyalists may recognize LeRoy from last year's competition where he lost by a single point in Combat. How does that saying go? Try, try again ...As promised, we'll deliver a Joystiq t-shirt to the first person who accurately guessed the challenge's secret identity. So, the prize goes to Protoster who wrote "I'll go with tetris" as comment 13. Congrats LeRoy, congrats Protoster. We're going home, as usual, empty handed (swag bag excluded, of course).[Note: I wrote this post live from the event, but it was apparently stuck in post-limbo. We'll be running some additional content from PAX throughout the week, including videos, interviews, and giveaways.][Update: Clarified inclusion of Tengen's Tetris; corrected last year's final challenge. Thanks, existonfile & Covarr.]
The Joystiq Weekend: PAX edition
The Penny Arcade Expo has come to a close, and we're planning on taken twice as many naps as usual to prepare for the Tokyo Games Show. While we dream of Tycho and Gabe (not like that ... hey, don't judge us!), check out the highlights for today:PAX RomanaAlex St. John's keynote of infamyGabe and Tycho ascend the Q&A altarOverheard at PAX: PS3 price "is some grade-A bullsh!t"IGN goes all Kano in Monday's comicOverheard at PAX: *crickets* (or: Gaming trivia contestants don't know jack)Tycho melts faces at Guitar Hero Omegathon challengeMC Frontalot busts rhymes, nerdcore style, at PAXScore a Joystiq shirt at PAXThe Minibosses were the final bosses at PAX concertJoystiq's own Chris G. sweats it out at the PAX new media panelJoystiqueryWeekly Webcomic Wrapup: Reader's choice NewsMac Halo now with Universal BinaryEA's admirable beginnings rememberedDestructoid takes early lead in Party of One battlePeaceaholics protest Bully, Best BuyManifesto Games web site sightingGame Boy Micro lands in UK bargain binGames shipping this weekMadden 07 demo on Xbox MarketplaceNew Prince of Persia DS title confirmedOld Man Murray gives Portal its voiceToyota Yaris ad campaign to spam XBLA?Team Fortress 2 overhauls medic classJeff Minter bringing space giraffes to XBLAEA interested in Crytek acquisition, reports German newspaperSacred 2 web site goes liveNintendo Wi-Fi Connection marks 2 million unique usersPlay catch up with Battlestar Galactica on the 360Xbox 360 backwards compatibility list updatedRumors & SpeculationRumor: Will Nintendo punk us with the Wii?Fake Wii "news" allegedly pulled from trash binLook: Assassin's Creed on Xbox 360!GameStop memo lists 36 PS3 games at $59.99, 19 potential launch titlesRumor: PS3 launching in black only?CultureLatest PSP firmware hack says "hello world"Pong gets all dressed up at German art exhibitFree gaming icons for Mac and PCStrategy guides make gaming more difficult?Nintendo doing the elderly (and you) a solid
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Hardcore gamers have a soft spot for the DS at PAX
Recently, we provided hard evidence that to children, the DS is far, far greater than that other handheld. Now, dear readers, we're ready to offer incontrovertible truth that the same standard holds when one looks to the few, the proud, the hardcore gamers. They're everywhere in the photos from PAX -- the Nintendo DS is just insidious like that. But hey, when you're waiting around, what better way to pass the time?Another picture after the jump.
Joystiq's own Chris G. sweats it out at the PAX new media panel
Our own Christopher Grant filled in today for an arguably hotter, but sadly absent, Frag Doll in PAX's "new media" panel on blogging, podcasts and other fancy publishing formats on them there Internets. He sat down with Kotaku's Brian Crecente, Julianne Greer from The Escapist, and MC Wilson from the Broadcast Gamer podcast, while Major Nelson moderated, gracefully playing the role of "corporate shill" (we're just playin'). The Web 2.0 buzzwords flew, Google Ad-Words were firmly promoted, NDAs were promptly scoffed, and Chris and Brian managed to leave the stage without resorting to fisticuffs. (Sad, yes.) E3 was a hot topic of debate -- even Major Nelson called it a mystery for Microsoft -- and all the panelists were unsure about the methods of coverage that will be available to them next year. An audience member mentioned that the Consumer Electronics Association (producers of that little Vegas show known as CES) are considering filling the gap, as we mentioned earlier this month, but it was still clear that future gaming shows are quite the mystery other than this weekend's obvious hit: PAX. We hope you can forgive this bit of utter meta vanity -- we'll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming -- but first, Chris would like to thank his Mom and his insatiable hunger for brains for making all of this possible. Oh, and if you'd like to hear the full discussion, Major Nelson should be posting it as a podcast soon, in true new media fashion.
The Minibosses were the final bosses at PAX concert
He's a little bit hip-hop, they're a little bit rock and roll.The Minibosses were the second and final band last night and the final band in the PAX concert series, following Friday night's performances by Optimus Rhyme, the NESkimos, and the always popular Video Game Pianist, Martin Leung. Their metal interpretations of classic video game tunes made our fingers ache for the day when maybe, if there is a benevolent deity, Activision will see fit to release a Guitar Hero expansion with only Minibosses tunes.Cell phones at U2 concerts? Pffft. We've got the main theater of the Meydenbauer Convention Center teeming with fans, all waving their brilliant (and copious) DS Lites in unison, screaming out "Rygar" and "Castlevania" between tracks. One of the Guitar Hero: Minibosses interstitials could read, "They don't really want you to play Rygar. They're just heckling you." More pics of the rock and a setlist after the break.
Score a Joystiq shirt at PAX
Despite the slower pace of today's PAX offerings, we're sure there's still plenty of readers rocking day three. In recognition of their fortitude, we've got a (relatively small) backpack full of variously sized Joystiq shirts we'll be handing out. A couple eagle eyed readers have already spotted us and asked for, nay, demanded a shirt and we, of course, obliged them with great celerity.Know this: there aren't many shirts to go around, so if you want one let's try to be discreet, k? Also, we're really rocking the smaller sizes, so we're looking at you ladies (or diminutive fellas, we're cool with that also).
MC Frontalot busts rhymes, nerdcore style, at PAX
Nerdcore hip-hop, an accurate term if ever there was one. MC Frontalot and his crew are the rock stars every nerd dreamt of being when they weren't getting punched in the stomach and looted for their lunch money.The platform we're typing this on is being sonically assaulted by waves of bass, sending fingers shuffling from key to key, while the screams of the audience cheer the crew on. Every reference to Carbonite or Ewoks sends a palpable wave of nerd over the audience, emboldening the fans to scream louder, fueling their frantic lightsaber waving. The most enjoyable part? MC Frontalot's bizarre shuffling that, we're told, is called "dancing." We wouldn't know, DDR ain't our game. More pics after the break.
PAX: Tycho melts faces at Guitar Hero Omegathon challenge
Tycho and Penny Arcade's biz dude Robert Khoo started round four of the Omegathon correct with an intense round of STP's "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart" in Guitar Hero II ... on Expert ... twice (it crashed half way through the first time). Then, 'cause he can, Tycho smashed his guitar. I wanted to yell out, say something about how starving kids in Africa don't even have guitar controllers at all, but the spirit of the evening washed over me, and my outrage morphed into delight.After their intro, the eight remaining Omeganauts took the stage for four rounds of one on one Guitar Hero II. Eight enter, but only four will leave. More pics and info after the break.
Overheard at PAX: *crickets* (or: Gaming trivia contestants don't know jack) [update 1]
Apparently Ubisoft had caseloads of Nivea for Men Sensitive Balm aftershave (with chamomile & vitamins, natch) that they were eager to give away (don't ask us, we just work here), so Alon, host of Chatterbox Video Game Radio and emcee of this morning's game trivia event, did his best to unload the goods. Alon: "Who needs any Sensitive balm?"Funny audience dude: "Those guys need it cause they're getting burned."Oooh snap! But seriously, these chumps missed some seriously easy questions: the house of Pac-Man merged with the house of Gundam to form NamcoBandai; Geometry Wars originally appeared in Project Gotham Racing 2; and Final Fantasy was the game series with a non-continuous storyline but always has a character named Cid. This stuff ain't that hard.The realities of human anatomy and the sinewy strength of muscle tissue were the only things keeping the heavens-stretched arms of the audience from reaching themselves straight off their bodies. The "ooh oohs" and "I know, I knows" were cacophonous and it appeared that more answers were coming from the peanut gallery than the podium.Thing is, Alon tells us that he tried his darndest to find some worthy contestants. He handed out sixty quizzes to PAX attendees (fer'chris'sakes!) with five gaming trivia questions to choose his combatants; unfortunately, no one got them all right. If everyone knew he had fourteen DS Lites bundled with Starfox Command, we're sure people would have been banging down these doors.[Update: added image of final score after the break. Thanks for the pic GrlGmr!]
PAX: IGN goes all Kano in Monday's comic
While creating Monday's Penny Arcade strip live (in front of a studio audience), a member of that very audience made an observation. Fans had decided that a particular style of hand that Mike draws consistently appears cupped as if holding a human heart. After acknowledging that he had just drawn that very hand on an IGN employee in the comic's second panel, Mike adroitly added a still beating human heart to it. So, what might otherwise appear to be an inscrutable non sequitur in Monday's finished product was really part of a unique interaction between fans and creators. The more you know ...Want the full funny? Hit up Tycho's script after the break. We know we're not the professional yucksters here, but we were under the impression that IGN reviewers didn't realize there were numbers less than 6.8. Just saying.
Nintendo's PAX booth tour
Just like Microsoft, Nintendo was a tad cramped in the PAX exhibition hall -- their full setup could've squeezed into a small corner of their Wii extravaganza at E3. But they're making the best of things with an all DS all the time booth, and quite a few new games on display such as Yoshi's Island 2 and Final Fantasy III. We can't deny we're a bit disappointed by the Wii's absence, and the resulting lines would've been fun to see as well, but it's not hard to see why Nintendo opted to keep their little mysterious console off the floor. Of course, with no plans by Nintendo to show the Wii at the Tokyo Games Show, we're starting to wonder if it'll show up in "public" at all before its still-undefined launch, but we suppose we'll see it when we see it.
Microsoft's PAX booth tour
Yeah, we're kicking it here with our Joystiq pals in beautiful Redmond, Washington for a weekend of rubbing shoulders with the game-nerd elite. PAX's 17,000+ attendees this year are bursting the Meydenbauer Center at the seams, which means exhibitors like Microsoft can't quite have their usual sprawl of a booth. Luckily, they're moving the show -- which is now the biggest games show in North America thanks to the demise of E3 -- to downtown Seattle at the Washington State Convention Center next year, so hopefully the claustrophobic among us will be able to manage a step through a booth in '07. Keep reading for pics of the setup, and start saving your pennies for next year's extravaganza.
Overheard at PAX: PS3 price "is some grade-A bullsh!t"
After being asked if the PlayStation 3 price would impact their decision to purchase one this fall, Jerry responded, "We've already talked about it, there's no chance we're buying a PS3 at launch. That's grade-A bullshit."The crowd erupted in applause, and bathed in their communal disdain for Sony's steep price point. The Penny Arcade guys continued explaining that their choice for next-gen gaming this fall will be the Wii60 combo platter. Of course, this echoes the sort of response we've seen both on Joystiq and the blogosphere as a whole. Maybe that's why Sony is the only one of "the big three" without a presence at PAX.
PAX: Gabe and Tycho ascend the Q&A altar
The first Penny Arcade panel kicked off last night with ... an onstage proposal. Yeah, that old chestnut. It's alright, who doesn't love the heartfelt union of two of our peers on stage? Cynical, jaded, lonely jerks, that's who!So we didn't like that part, but then the evening's ringmasters took the stage to dive into their promised, and much ballyhooed, announcement ... which was, of course, leaked some hours earlier. Regardless, they announce their project, dubbed Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, to some degree of surprise, before beginning a long, often confusing, funny, and surprisingly intimate Q&A.Like the comic whose brand we've all assembled under, the questions run the gamut from the console fanboy Coke or Pepsi questions (they're going Wii60 by the way), the comic fanboy questions regarding Fruit Fucker Prime's unique feature set (he can only launch 100 out of 10,000 fruit fuckers, "it's a design flaw"), the lexiconnoisseur fanboy questions about what one would call those words, you know the ones, that sound the same in different languages but have different meanings (it's okay, Tycho didn't know it either), and just how much of an asshole Jack Thompson really is (a serious one).Seeing two regular looking dudes ("hey, they don't look like Gabe and Tycho!") field questions from throngs of loyal fans of a video gaming webcomic is a strange sort of experience; possibly a sign of video games increasing cultural potency, or of the End Times. Jury's still out on that one.
PAX: Alex St. John's keynote of infamy
Alex St. John breaks Washington State laws by smoking onstageAlex St. John, the creator of Microsoft's DirectX API and founder of Wild Tangent, delivered a bizarre, and borderline unbelievable, PAX keynote yesterday. With equal parts alien spaceships, hostage negotiations, enormous 10' vaginas (courtesy of GWAR), Bill Gates embarrassing promotional video career and, of course, Microsoft's Julia Child's Wine Guide CD-ROM, I'd be doing a serious disservice to Mr. St. John if I attempted to encapsulate his performance.What a performance! The keynote began with St. John tossing out large balls (that later took on an infamy all their own), mini glow-in-the-dark frisbees, and ping pong balls before he began his sordid tale. St. John began playing with decaptitated moose heads in Alaska as a child and ended up being the creator of DirectX at Microsoft as they entered the increasingly lucrative video game space. Of course, this journey was wrought with crazy situations (see aforementioned 10' vagina) and a fair amount of trepidation on the entire software community's part (a Windows blue screen at a developer's event was met with chants of "DOS, DOS, DOS!"). Despite these difficulties, the successful launch of the DirectX-Box means that Alex St. John has left an indelible impression on the gaming industry.Here's our question: instead of doing keynotes and running software companies, why isn't this guy writing a tell-all book to prove that gaming has its own wild, rockstar tales?[Thanks to Philip Palermo for the classy pic]
Overheard at PAX: because "OmegaDethlord" sounds so formal
Overheard at PAX: "Hey... umm, uhh... What's up? Like, do I use your real name or your internet name?"
First Art of new Penny Arcade game: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
We're sitting here in the "big theater" at Meydenbauer as the clock strikes 7 PM, signalling the end of an embargo on the teaser image shown here. Now, normally we're not ones to post teaser junk, but we'll cut the Penny Arcade boys some slack given that they're new to this whole game thing and we tend to always root for the underdog. One thing we won't let slide is that tagline. Is this like a new Leisure Suit Larry game or summat?
Penny Arcade pilgrims play blue ball game
While sitting outside the main hall of Meydenbauer waiting for the first live panel with Penny Arcade's Gabe and Tycho to begin, the crowd grew restless. Someone produced a blue ball. Someone else started a chant. The ball was crowned king. The ball was worshipped. The ball was bounced from the ground level to the first balcony, and a game was born: bounce the ball up, way up to the top of the atrium. It was all good until some nubcake bounced the ball too high, and it got lost. Boos rumbled through Meydenbauer, but you can't keep gamers down. Bean bags were quickly brought into the mix, and festivities resumed. There's a good vibe here at PAX, and this little emergent game demonstrates it better than any press release. This crowd came ready to play. [Update 1: Image credit to Miles from Tacoma. Thanks, Miles!]
Penny Arcade presents Penny Arcade Game starring Penny Arcade
The news is out, PA Panel and embargoes be damned! Penny Arcade are making a game! We know what your first reaction is:"Knowing Tycho's concupiscent relationship with italicized words of Brobdingnagian proportions, we can only assume it will be an impossibly difficult Scrabble variant tailored, like the finest Italian suit, for lexiconnoisseurs."You might be correct in such an assumption ... but you're not. "It must be a 'poke the doll' game where we play as our favorite erotic fruit juicing device and sweet, succulent fruit takes on the role of the pliable porn starlet."Wrong again. It will be, in fact, an episodic "comic adventure" known simply -- or, rather, not so simply -- as Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. The installments will initially be available on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms, "followed by a version for next-generation consoles." Robert Khoo, Director of Business Development for Penny Arcade, assured us these would be episodic as well, as opposed to a compilation of episodes. Khoo told us "it's an RPG in short" but will contain elements of adventure games befitting its "comic adventure" moniker. Knowing that adventure games, episodic content, and creative control are a publisher's kiss of death, Penny Arcade, like Telltale before them, will be distributing their game directly, bypassing retailers and online platforms like Steam and GameTap (for now). The game is being developed by Hothead Games, comprised of former employees of Radical Entertainment, makers of Simpson: Road Rage, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction (read: two licensed games that don't totally suck). Khoo was quick to dash any notion that this would, in fact, be a licensed game exactly. Both Tycho and Gabe have been hands-on every day with the developers working on everything from art and story to design. Khoo explained just how much hot and heavy greasy hand to game contact there's been: "We're doing everything we can to make sure it has our fingerprints all over it." Yeah, now that's hands-on.So when can you virtually copulate with big, long words, PA style? They're taking the Duke Nukem Forever "when it's done" route. We'll be sure to ask about the possibility of fruit copulation and Scrabble minigames. Shiny new press release embedded after the break.
Got any questions for the PAX panels?
Penny Arcade's resident bidness man, Robert Khoo, is asking the PA forum posters to think of stock questions to keep the Q&A panels going. Here's the list of events: Girls? Games? Hah! The Growing Role of Women in the Game Industry The Domination of Online Games Breaking into the Game Industry How the Industry is Busted and What's Being Done to Fix It. Make a Game For Under 10 Grand: Indy Games in the Hardcore Space I'm Getting Old: When Life Cuts Into Gaming Blogphotopodcasting: New Media in the Game Industry Rolling the Saving Throw: Why the Tabletop Genre Isn't Dead Go to the linked PA forum page and add your questions via the format "#. question" (e.g., 6. What's more important -- baby sitting or Geometry Wars?).
