penny-arcade-adventures posts

A good portion of the country is in a deep freeze. All the better to stay at home and play some games with friends.

• Steam has a new beta version of Monday Night Combat available for download for people who pre-ordered the game.
• GoG.com has added the original version of Broken Sword for free when people buy the new Director's Cut version of the adventure game
• Bungie has filed for a number of trademarks to various names. Not really helpful but some people like seeing this stuff.
• More Far Cry 3 speculation hits the internets.
• A Battlefield Bad Company 2/Vietnam server patch has been released that fixes, among other things, the "invisible boat bug"
• The two Penny Arcade Adventures games are selling well on the new Mac App Store but a third installment is still not coming.
• Check out this feature-length movie made inside Grand Theft Auto IV.
• And finally: by this time tomorrow, Minecraft is most likely to have gone over the 1 million units sales mark.

Telltale Games' big Adventure Game Bundle 2010 deal is coming to a close on Monday but before it does the developer has decided to unlock the sixth and final game for everyone who has or who will purchase the bundle. It's Sam and Max: Beyond Time and Space, the second "season" of Telltale's episodic game series. Telltale was going to wait to add Sam and Max until it sold 5,000 bundles but apparently decided to unlock the final game ahead of time.

Besides Sam and Max the bundle has the following games, all of which are available for the bundle price of $19.95: The Whispered World, Jack Keane, King's Quest Collection (with several games in the King's Quest series), Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1, and Puzzle Agent. 25 percent of the proceeds will still be going to several charities including Child's Play, The World Wildlife Fund, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Nyota e.V., and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Last Friday was supposed to be the last day that Telltale Games offered up the Great Adventure Bundle 2010 featuring a number of downloadable adventure games for the low price of $19.95. However Telltale has decided to extend that offer for a bit longer. The developer has announced that the bundle deal will now end on Friday, September 17.

Just a reminder: The games in the bundle include The Whispered World, Jack Keane, King's Quest Collection (with several games in the King's Quest series), Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1, and Puzzle Agent. When the deal sells 5,000 bundles, Telltale will also unlock Sam and Max: Across Time and Space for free. 25 percent of the procees go to several charities including Child's Play, The World Wildlife Fund, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Nyota e.V., and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

If you love classic and new adventure games and also want to contribute something to society, Telltale Games has a deal for you. Today the developer launched The Great Adventure Game Bundle 2010 where you can purchase six game title for just $19.95. The games included in the bundle are The Whispered World, Jack Keane, King's Quest Collection (with three games in the King's Quest series) and Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1.

In addition to the cheap price Telltale will give 25 percent of the proceeds from the bundle to five different charities (Child's Play, The World Wildlife Fund, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, Nyota e.V., and the Electronic Frontier Foundation). You can pick which charity you want to support when you purchase the bundle. If you don't choose the money will be spread evenly among the five organizations.

Finally if 5,000 bundles are sold, Telltale will throw in access to its own game Puzzle Agent for free and will also provide Sam and Max: Across Time and Space for free after a second, unknown, amount of bundles are sold. There's no word on how long the bundle deal will last

This week started out a little slow but ended with a ton of announcements and reveals. And with Gamescom coming up next week you can bet there will be lots more to read about in the near future:

• The Penny Arcade web site has started posting up the fictional story for the canceled third game episode for Penny Arcade Adventures.
• Bethesda Games Studios is still working on a game and no, you can't know what it is yet.
• There's an odd little secret in Plants Vs Zombies' achievement screen.
• All of Valve's Left 4 Dead merchandise is on sale on Valve's online store until August 17.
• Victoria 2 is now available on Steam and for the next week you can get Victoria 1 Complete for free if you purchase Victoria 2.
• The upcoming zombie themed tactical RTS game Trapped Dead now has an official web site.
• Check out this video of a StarCraft 2 third person "zombie shooter" map (and we use that term loosely)
• For some reason NBC is promoting the upcoming TV show The Event with a contest that will send five winners to BlizzCon 2010.

All they did was to write and draw a game-oriented comic strip on the internet. Yet Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins's launch of the Penny Arcade web strip and site in 1998 was just the starting point for a host of other opportunities. Now those efforts have landed the duo on the list of Time's 2010 list of the world's 100 most influential people.

While the Penny Arcade web site has 3.5 million readers, Time focuses on two of the team's other ventures; the Penny Arcade Expo, which now has two events per year that bring in over 50,000 attendees for each event, and Child's Play, the children's hospital charity that raises over $1,000,000 in money and gifts per year. While the creators of all these ventures give the credit for their success to their fans, Time states, "Krahulik and Holkins have become the tastemakers, and conscience, of an industry the size of Hollywood."

Fans of the first two Penny Arcade Adventures episodes who have been awaiting the third installment for over a year are not going to be happy with this news. Our sister site Joystiq reports from PAX East 2010 that all future planned installments of the adventure-RPG series based on the Penny Arcade web comic strip have now been canceled.

There were supposed to be at least two more episodes of the series following the downloadable release of the first two installments in 2008. However, as we noted earlier this month, the game's developer Hothead Games stated those two episodes "didn't sell as well as we would have liked." Also Hothead just got a big publishing deal from Electronic Arts for their long awaited game DeathSpank. In the end, according to Penny Arcade co-creator Jerry Holkins, the decision was made to cancel future Penny Arcade Adventures episodes rather than have Hothead work on both projects. He states, " . . . we'd rather not do it than do it half-assed." The storyline that was begun in the game will be completed on the Penny Arcade web site.

People have been wondering why there has not been much word on the fate of Penny Arcade Adventures. The first two chapters in the episodic adventure-RPG series from developer Hothead Games came out in 2008 but since then there's been no word on when the third chapter in the series will be released. Now a new Gamasutra interview may have found the reason for the delay.

Hothead's CEO Ian Wilkinson stated that while the first two chapters in Penny Arcade Adventures (based on the Penny Arcade web comic strip) got solid critical notices, "The Penny Arcade series didn't sell as well as we would have liked." He added, "With Penny Arcade, yes, a lot of people knew about it, but we just couldn't transition those people into buyers." There are hints that we will finally learn something about the third chapter in the series at PAX East later in March.

Next month's first annual PAX East in Boston is shaping up to be a pretty big deal for a first time event. Nvidia has already announced their plans to hold their big launch event for their next-gen graphics cards at the show and a number of game developers and publishers have already signed on. Now the show has posted up their official schedule of panels and theater events. The panels range from "The Future of the PC Platform (Yes, there is one)" to "The Future of the MMO Scene). There also appears to be a lot of game journalism panels for some reason.

Speaking of journalism, the Journal of New England Technology web site has posted an article on PAX East where it claims the show could generate between $16 million and $19 million for the local Boston economy. Three day tickets sold out a while ago as did one day tickets for Friday but Penny Arcade's Robert Khoo states on his Twitter page, "A few hundred sat and sun badges left!."

It's been a long, long wait for the third and next episode in the Penny Arcade Adventures series. The first two chapters in the adventure-RPG series from developer Hothead Games came in 2008 but since then there's been a cone of silence about the third episode's status. Even the Penny Arcade team wouldn't admit what the delay was about at last September's PAX, saying only that there was a good reason for the third episode's lateness.

MTV's Multiplayer blog site got one half of the Penny Arcade team, Jerry Holkins, to give a (kind of) status report. Basically he hinted that announcements about the third chapter would come around the time of PAX East in Boston. Hopefully, they won't keep us waiting much longer.