I was sent a review code for Crimson Alliance yesterday and I spent the evening checking it out. This was actually the second time I played the game. The first time I saw it was down at Comic Con back in July. At the time I had never heard of the game and I walked away thoroughly impressed.

We have more or less the same complaint as everyone else regarding Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it's just that we have this complaint a full week later on account of the PAX chronovortax.

Scalpers will attempt to monetize any well-attended event; the event itself is irrelevant. We've always had trouble with the shadow market for the normal reasons but also because the show consistently sells out. This year, we saw something new: counterfeit badges of substantial cleverness and quality.

He just sent me these images as well, more examples of his concealed data shenanigans, but what I like about these is that they're also beautiful in their own right. You can click on any of them if you want to see them in a larger format.

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