Penny-Arcade posts

The Child's Play game-themed charity is expanding its reach once again in an unique way. Today it was announced that in association with the ESA Foundation, the charity will host its first annual golf tournament to raise funds for the many children's hospitals it supports.

The tournament will be held on June 5 at the Brookside Golf Course in Pasadena, California, just a couple of days before E3 2011 is slated to officially begin in nearby Los Angeles. More details and sign ups for the tournament are now available on the Penny Arcade web site. The entry fee will be $150 or $175 with club rental.

With two versions of the Penny Arcade Expo now in full swing, gamers only have to wait a few months rather than a whole year to get their PAX fix. Today registration has started for PAX Prime 2011, the show that started it all. It will be held once again at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in downtown Seattle, Washington. The dates are August 26-28.

Advanced tickets for the show will be priced at $35 for each day or $60 for all three days. The show has been selling out of tickets a few days before it begins so if you want to make sure you can attend it's best to pony up the money ahead of time.

Just ahead of PAX East 2011, the team at developer Uber Entertainment have just released a new PC version update for its multiplayer action game Monday Night Combat. The update, via Steam, has some neat content additions, including being able to outfit the game's Assassin character in Penny Arcade's Cardboard Tube Samurai.

Other new additions include new Outlander gear for your team (complete with new taunts) and a new All-Star player ranking system where players can guage how good of a player they are compared to other players on a server. Your player rating will automatically adjust; if you are on a killing spree your rating will go up. If you keep getting killed the ranking will go down. You can check out the new content for the game at the trailer after the jump:

If you are attending PAX East 2011 this weekend you can drop by the Uber Entertainment booth and get access to a code that will unlock an exclusive Authentic Battle Damage version of the Cardboard Tube Samurai outfit. You will also see a preview of an upcoming new map, Uncle Tully's Funland.

It's official. The second annual PAX East gaming event in Boston is officially sold out. The official Penny Arcade Expo web site has confirmed that all of the tickets for the March 11-13 event at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center are spoken for. In case that wasn't clear, the web site states, "We will not sell any (tickets) at the show. There are no more available. Please do not email us asking if this is a real thing. It is real. I'm serious."

For those of you lucky enough to have tickets to PAX East 2011 the web site has some helpful info for attendees including the fact that it will be first come, first serve for attending the Friday and Saturday night concerts. There will also be a giant food court created especially for the show in the convention center since there are not many places to eat nearby.

PAX East 2011 is less than a week away but opportunity to attend at least one day of the March 11-13 gaming event in Boston are slipping away. According to a post today on the official PAX Twitter page, " ... we only have about 250 Sunday badges left!". Those tickets are expected to sell out before the start of PAX East on Friday.

Meanwhile game publishers and developers are starting to annouce their PAX East exhibit plans:

• Irrational Games will be holding an invite only party on March 12.
• ArenaNet will show off a playable version of Guild Wars 2 at PAX East.
• FireFall will be shown off for the first time in playable form at PAX East.
• Nvidia is rumored to launch its new dual GPU graphics card the GeForce GTX 590 at PAX East.

Mojang, the Sweden-based development team that's in charge of the hit indie sandbox game Minecraft, have announced its next project at GDC. It's a fantasy themed virtual collectible card-based strategy game called Scrolls.

Gamasutra has the first details on Scrolls which also has elements of board games. While there will be a single player campaign most of the game's focus will be online multiplayer matches where players will collect their cards (or "scrolls") and use them to summon units and cast spells on a battlefield that will resemble a chess board. Interestingly, Penny Arcade's Jerry "Tycho" Holkins will also be involved with Scrolls to help develop the game's fictional back story. The game will have a closed alpha test later this year and will consist of a number of players who originally bought the alpha version of Minecraft. The game itself will be free to play but with revenue generated from selling new "scrolls" to players.

With just under 18 days to go, PAX East 2011 preparations are starting to accelerate. The event's official web site has now confirmed that all three day tickets for the March 11-13 event in Boston are sold out, as are all Saturday tickets. There are still some left for Friday and Sunday but they are expected to go quickly.

The show's expo map has also been uploaded to the PAX East web site and it reveals lots of exhibitors that until now have not been announced. Bethesda Softworks will be at the show, as well as Electronic Arts, Kalypso Media, Microsoft, Valve and many more. The show is expected to have attendance that will be much higher than last year's inaugural PAX East event.

The two versions of the Penny Arcade Expo gaming event have been very successful with the PAX Prime event in Seattle bringing in over 60,000 attendees and the first PAX East in Boston launching in 2010 with over 50,000 attendees. Now it looks like the Penny Arcade team along with its convention partner Reed Exhibitions are starting to think about taking the PAX show over the Atlantic to Great Britain.

The online survey, intended for UK users, asks people if they would attend a version of PAX were to come to that country, along with choices of specific locations and what kind of events would be important in any UK version of PAX. This survey comes less than a month before the second annual PAX East event occures on March 11-13.

[Via VG247.com]

Monday Night Combat is one of the better multiplayer shooters out there, and it's finally left beta on the PC. To commemorate the occasion, the developers at Uber Entertainment have released a launch trailer that shows off almost every aspect of gameplay. In addition, they have also crossed over with two other incredibly popular franchises: Team Fortress 2 and Penny Arcade. This trailer shows off the different additions to both MNC and TF2, as well as the new Penny Arcade bot. Let's just leave it that it's mildly not safe for work.

Download Monday Night Combat 'PC Launch' Trailer
Check out all Monday Night Combat downloads

As promised, developer Uber Entertainment has released the (non-beta) version of Monday Night Combat for the PC. You can buy the game via Steam for $14.99 or in a four pack for $44.97 which gets you four copies for the price of three. The PC port launches with some new features such as the Pro Gear system that will allow players to customize the look of their player characters. There's also a crossover with the Penny Arcade comic strip as the Juice Bot character might pop up to replace the normal mascot during a match.

If you purchase the game before February 1 you will also get some Team Fortress 2 inspired items for your Monday Night Combat characters. If you own Team Fortress 2 you can also get some Monday Night Combat wearable items for that game as well.